


temper with the stars

by nasri



Category: Being Human (UK), The Almighty Johnsons
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-01
Updated: 2015-12-01
Packaged: 2018-05-04 10:40:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5331164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nasri/pseuds/nasri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He doesn’t even know his name. He knows he’s beautiful, that he laughs easily and he smokes too many cigarettes and he’s from a town in Ireland with nothing but green grass. He knows he doesn’t mind the cold, that he hardly ever reads, and he’s partial to coffee served black.</p><p>One day he’ll ask, but by the time spring rolls around and the locks begin to fill again, he’s gone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	temper with the stars

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sure this is riddled with errors. Everyone bear with me.

Anders has eight years of sun. His winters are curbed by his oversized jumpers, his hands dig deep into rich, solid earth, his fingernails are perpetually caked in mud. When it rains it pours and when it pours he curls next to Mike on the old wicker furniture scattered across their back porch and he listens as he reads stories from thin, colourful books. He learns how to make people laugh in the warm classrooms of his state school, knows well enough what his teachers will scold him for and what makes them smile regardless. His afternoons are spent watching Ty toddle about the back garden in little velcro shoes of fluorescent green. He climbs trees on the farm and makes wishes on dandelion flowers and learns to read in broken halted sentences. Mike assures him that he’ll get better. Everything just takes practice.  
  
When he’s nine years old his family trades their sandy beaches for rocky shores and Anders learns that he can live without the sun. London teaches him to see in greyscale, to elongate his vowels, to wear a uniform. December sees his breath go up in smoke and Ty’s fingers are always cold when he reaches for him at night. His hair curls and fades from a childish white blonde to something far darker. He thinks it suits him.  
  
His mother’s distant gaze falls even farther. He catches her staring out the kitchen window, sponge clutched in her hand, her knuckles white as water drips a steady pattern onto the tiled floor. He thinks she misses their garden, though he doesn’t know for sure. London teaches him to watch the uneven sidewalks, how to live with paper thin walls. It teaches him how to cook with an old gas hob, how to light a match without wasting one first, to pull his hand away just in time.  
  
He is ten years old when Axl is born and he cries into his pillow, his chest heaving in gasping, panicked breaths though he doesn’t quite know why. Mike spends the night at the hospital and their father hasn’t been seen for days. Anders stays awake and reads a book about a girl trapped on an island in the Pacific who survives with tools of bone and clothes of cormorant feathers and he thinks he would give up every square inch of their little terraced house to be alone.  
  
His father soon leaves for the siren call of the sea, but before he goes he draws blood. Anders learns how to jam doors closed from the inside, learns to whisper into Axl’s ear, to keep him quiet as glass shatters in the kitchen. The closest he gets to being alone is when Mike takes him to the Tower of London with money stolen from their mother’s purse. As they walk, Anders runs his fingers over the messages carved into the stone walls. Some are in Latin, some are illegible, and some remain unfinished.  
  
“Learn to fear God,” Anders reads.  
  
Mike holds his hand tightly, and points to another. “To whom you give your secret, you give liberty.”  
  
He learns to lie, quickly and beautifully. He learns how to summon tears with the slightest provocation, he learns to smile with absolute conviction. He spends hours and hours reading. He learns to wake to the sound of an infant crying.    
  
He is fifteen when he decides that adults have lost something essential. His father lost his heart to the ocean and his mother left, without a word, for the forests of the South Pacific and Mike turns twenty-one and his kindness falls to ruin. Anders learns how to provoke, how to keep his brother’s attention focused for more than seconds at a time.  
  
Sometimes, he considers leaving. He thinks he could manage, like the feral children from his story books. Sometimes, he considers telling the truth to the social workers who make him tea every Wednesday and ask detailed questions about his brothers.  
  
But in the end he limits himself to the walkway over the Camden docks, far away from their damp, drafty house. The lock is empty in the winter, the barges lowered and filled with scummy, stagnant water, black but for the reflection of hazy overcast. He jumps the gate and settles in on the flimsy bridge over the water, his fingers tracing patterns onto the gritty stone.  
  
This is what he gives himself, each day, no matter the weather. He sits and he imagines stories that unfold on century old banks. He thinks of the fires that brought down the Camden Town factories and he imagines the men who carved messages into the Tower of London, the scaffolding that used to sway along the Thames. His head is filled with more stories than he could ever tell. So he sits and he imagines and then he leaves them to the shallows of the lock.  
  
“You know, you’re not meant to be over there.” Anders jumps but his fingers stay clasped to the edge of the bridge. To his left is a man, leaning heavily on the gate, lighting a cigarette in his cupped hands.  
  
“It’s okay,” Anders says. “Mum works in the cafe just up there.” He points at the low lights of a little Italian restaurant with a patio overlooking the water. “I forgot my keys at school so I had to come here and wait for her to get out of work. She knows where I am.”  
  
He smiles, blowing smoke into the air. “Oh yeah? You forget your keys every day, do you?”  
  
Anders shoulders tense and his eyes narrow. “Make a habit of following kids around?” He snaps over his shoulder. The man looks like he could be Mike’s age, maybe a few years older. Anders wonders what it is he’s lost.  
  
“Not usually, no. But you see, I do work just down the way and I’ve seen you here before.”  
  
“Fuck off,” he says.  
  
“I was just curious,” he continues. “I wanted to know if you can swim.”  
  
He learned to swim on beaches lined with sea glass, in the gentile tides of Makaretu River. Sometimes it seems like a dream, like another one of his stories. He doesn’t tell him that. “Of course I can fucking swim.”  
  
“Good,” he says, flicking his cigarette into the water. Anders watches it slowly drift towards his dangling feet. “That’s all I wanted to know.”  
  
He comes back every week, usually in the evening when the sun just begins to set, and stands on the other side of the gate, watching him. Sometimes he speaks and sometimes he doesn’t, but he always stays until Anders crosses safely to the other side, before walking back the way he came.  
  
Today he’s wearing a thin track jacket, an ugly lavender thing that Anders rolls his eyes at. “Does your mother really know you’re here?” He asks.  
  
“I don’t have a mother.” It feels close enough to the truth.  
  
“Do you have a father?”  
  
“I have a social worker,” he offers.  
  
He blows cigarette smoke into the air. “I feel for your social worker, mate.” Anders fights back a smile.  
  
He falls asleep every night with Ty tucked against his lower back and he learns to settle from nightmares without waking him. He doesn’t dream of dragons or shadows on the wall or wolves in packs or shuddering windows. Instead he dreams of their little terraced home, old and abandoned and black with mould. The table is still set for dinner, their shoes are lined at the door. Sometimes he dreams of drowning in seas of crystal blue, and he wakes thankful that it wasn’t the darkness of the lock.  
  
It’s raining when the man from the lock first climbs the fence, pushing himself up and over and landing with far more grace than Anders ever managed. He reaches into his back pocket before crossing the bridge and pulls out a folded black umbrella.  
  
“I’m fine,” he says.  
  
“I’m cold just looking at you.” He sits himself down on the concrete and opens the umbrella above their heads. It’s flimsy and small but it covers them well enough and Anders listens to the sound of raindrops against canvas. They don’t talk for the rest of the evening but before he leaves he hands Anders the umbrella, insisting he take it with him.  
  
“You can always bring it back next week,” he says with a smile. Anders hates the feeling he gets, deep in his chest, when he hears his voice.  
  
“Yeah,” he says. “I will.”  
  
Anders learns that he’s a better runner than a fighter, that he talks himself into more problems than he can get himself out of. He also learns how easy it is to knick Cadbury bars from little corner shops in Croyden. He learns all the tricks to long division and multiplying fractions for a second time as Ty chews his pencil caps over sheets and sheets of math problems. He learns where it is Mike goes at night, and he thinks he may hate him for it.  
  
“Where are you from?” Anders asks him one day. He is laying flat on his back across the concrete jetty, his hair a pillow of curls, catching on every stone snag. His accent is too light for Dublin, he thinks. Or maybe he’s just like Anders and London has sanded down his vowels, has forced him into place.  
  
“Ireland.”  
  
“Christ, obviously. Where in Ireland? Not Dublin, right? But not far from it?” He likes to think he has a head for vowels and consonants and for the sounds of people’s homes.  
  
“Geashill,” he says. “Though I haven’t been back in years and years.”  
  
“Geashill,” he repeats. “What’s it like?”  
  
“When I was growing up it was another world. Now, I’m betting it’s nothing at all.”  
  
He learns about the Greeks and their Gods, dreams of daggers hidden in myrtle wreaths, imagines the summit of Acropolis. Mike watches him thumb through a book on Troy and two days later Anders returns home to an old, dusty tome on Norse mythology left open on his bed. Anders doesn’t thank him but he reads it nonetheless and thinks he sees something familiar in Njörðr, the god who cannot sleep unless he lays upon the seabeds.  
  
The sun is setting low behind the stretch of trees that line the docks and he is late. Anders sits, kicking his feet against the stone, and tries not to think about it.  
  
“Hey,” he shouts, jogging down the street, armed with a leather coat and beaten gloves. He’s holding a plastic bag in each hand. “I come bearing gifts.”  
  
He manages to climb the fence without spilling everything to the ground, and Anders rolls his eyes, smiling. “We closed again with leftovers, there’s enough for you to take home.” They open styrofoam containers of curry and naan and Anders knows he’s lying but he eats it nonetheless.  
  
“Do you ever have anything other than take out?”  
  
He picks around the peas in his biryani. “Are you asking if I can cook?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“Well I’m happy to inform you that I can, I just choose not to. Why waste the time when I can pay someone far more talented than I am to do it instead?”  
  
Anders thinks that, like most things, it’s not a matter of talent. “You’re lazy,” he tells him and he laughs and laughs until finally Anders is laughing with him.  
  
Mike never asks questions, so Anders learns to never provide any explanations and they busy themselves pretending to be cordial and well adjusted. Axl is still too young to pick up on their careful, scripted interactions, unlike Ty who watches with ill concealed trepidation over bowls of instant soup. Axl is bright and curious and every discovery, every delighted laugh makes Anders’ heart ache because he knows he’ll be forced to watch as his wonder fades. He wants to keep him like this, forever wrapped in old knitted afghans, his own royal robe, declaring himself the King of Kings.    
  
“Frog prince, more like,” Anders tells him.  
  
“I’d love to be a frog.” He whispers like it’s a secret and Anders presses a kiss to his hair.  
  
“I prefer you human.”  
  
“Alright,” he says. “Then I’ll stay.”  
  
It snows for two days straight, an anomaly in London, and Camden Town is deserted. He spends a moment leaning on the gate, staring at the water, unfrozen and black against the white sheets of snow. It looks like a painting and a small part of him is eager to ruin it. He pushes himself up but before he can swing a leg over the gate, a hand hooks around his elbow, pulling him back down.  
  
“Not a fucking chance, kid. You’ll slip right off the bridge. I almost fell on my arse twice just walking here.”  
  
“I’m not as clumsy as you are,” he says, but Anders allows him to tug him back onto the sidewalk anyway, adjusting his sleeves when he finally lets go.  
  
“Come on, I’ll buy you hot chocolate if you promise not to climb the gate when it’s icy as the ninth circle out here.”  
  
“I can swim,” Anders reminds him, but he promises anyway.    
  
He learns he’s a decent test taker, a decent student even, when he takes the time to do the work. His history teacher pulls him aside and asks why no one came to parents’ night and Anders learns to smile when he tells people that his older brother is his only guardian, that he works two jobs. It’s partially true at least, and he watches his teacher’s face crumple and fall as she offers to meet with him instead, to discuss his progress after class. Anders nods and pretends to listen but he doesn’t hear a word.  
  
Anders realises he’s in love when they sit side by side over the lock as he tries to name Greek gods off the top of his head. “What about the planets?” He asks. “Jupiter and that. Do they count?”  
  
He smiles, watching him from the corner of his eye. “No, those are the Roman names. You’re up to six.”  
  
“Just six?” He asks, outraged. “I am shit at this.”  
  
“Yeah,” Anders agrees. “You are a bit.”  
  
“Which ones are the constellations?”  
  
“Both.”  
  
He groans.  
  
“I could show you, if it was dark enough.” Camden Town glows with hazy orange street lights and the sky reflects nothing but shades of gold and grey.  
  
“One day,” he tells him. “I’ll take you up on that.”  
  
He doesn’t even know his name. He knows he’s beautiful, that he laughs easily and he smokes too many cigarettes and he’s from a town in Ireland with nothing but green grass. He knows he doesn’t mind the cold, that he hardly ever reads, and he’s partial to coffee served black.  
  
One day, he’ll ask, but by the time spring rolls around and the locks begin to fill again, he’s gone.  
  
Anders should have known better. Adults leave, they run and they search for whatever it is they’re missing. He can’t bring himself to hate him for it, though he badly wants to. At night he lies in bed while tears collect in the hollows of his eyes and he imagines that he’s gone back to Gaeshill to see what is left of his home. Maybe one day, when he’s old enough, Anders will go there too.  
  
He studies history and Latin for his GCSEs and Mike rolls his eyes, tells him he’s absolutely wasting his time, and Anders starts to believe him. He learns how to style his hair, how to dress to accommodate his height, how to smile at girls his age, and most importantly how to feign interest. He learns how to kiss down a side street in King’s Cross, along a rusted gate between council housing flats. Her skin is smooth and for a moment he thinks of stopping but then she parts her lips and he hikes up her tartan skirt and he forgets all about the man from the lock.  
  
He gets accepted to a sixth form in Southbank with a bursary. He studies for all of two weeks, but then Anders learns about ecstasy. He catalogues club drug cocktails and takes acid pressed to his tongue by the fingers of a girl two years his senior. He learns which bars don’t check IDs, figures out how to slip into bed without waking Ty. He spends most mornings dry heaving into the toilet and he attends most classes hungover. He trades his stories for tequila shots and never once looks back.  
  
—  
  
Even in the low red glare of the club lights, Anders recognises him. He is just as beautiful as he was in the overhang of Camden Town five years ago, with his tacky lilac clothing and his wide set smile. He looks just the same, like a photograph, a perfect mirror image. His unruly hair is slicked back and his eyes are dark and Anders is only inches away from undoing the silver buttons on his shirt, opening them one by one.  
  
“I know you,” he says, reaching for him, catching his elbow.  
  
He turns, brows pulled together in a scowl. “Let go.”  
  
“I know you,” he repeats. The coke is catching his tongue, pulling it to the roof of his mouth and rendering him incapable of saying anything else.  
  
“I think you’re mistaken, mate.” He pulls away but his accent is the same, his dull syllables of not-quite-Dublin.  
  
“Gaeshill,” he calls after him. “You’re from Gaeshill.”  
  
He stops, his hands tighten into fists. He glances over his shoulder and his eyes look black in the low light. Anders thinks for a moment that he might turn around, that he might explain what he lost, what holes exist in his chest. He doesn’t, instead he leaves without looking back.  
  
Anders spends the morning coming down in the bathtub of a girl who’s name he can’t quite remember. She was beautiful and tasted of vanilla body lotion and now she’s asleep on her flatmate’s twin bed while Anders stares up at the white and grey patterns of her shower curtain.  
  
He knows what he’s lost. He’s known for years and years. He lost the sun, and everything since then has been learning how to cope.  
  
—  
  
When Anders turns twenty-one, Bragi whispers to him in gold gilded words and everything makes perfect sense. He worships the dip between a blonde woman’s breasts, he hums praises and suggestions and watches as she reacts, pulled by invisible strings like an oracle of ancient Greece.  
  
His suggestions get him through university despite missing most of his classes, and it gains him job interviews and training contracts and suddenly the world just parts like the Red fucking Sea and Anders thinks this might be the best thing that’s ever happened to him.  
  
Despite himself, Bragi breathes life into his old dusty books, into the collection he keeps in cardboard boxes in cupboards, stored below the boiler. He falls back into history and mythology, he reads poetry and remembers his Latin nouns and their declensions.  
  
Sometimes, when he lies awake at night to the orange glow of the street lights, Bragi reminds him of the exact tenor of his voice, his cadence, his soft syllables. The man from the lock survives in Bragi’s gentle, midnight reminders. He comes to accept that the man he saw in the club was a figment of one of many drug cocktails, pulled from the depth of his subconscious. It’s like dreaming about someone he hasn’t seen in years. He justifies, he compartmentalises, and he gets on with his life.    
  
He has a hair colour for every day of the week. He picks up a blonde on Tuesday, a redhead on Thursday, a bit of pink hair dye in Leicester for his Friday night out. He doesn’t even need to pretend anymore, he doesn’t need to act, because a few words in their ears turn them to puppets and he holds their strings taught between his teeth.  
  
Anders spent years learning about loss, and now he takes what he is due.  
  
—  
  
The last time he sees Mike is the day Ty turns twenty-one, the day Anders watches his little brother lose his warmth, his iron, his confidence. He gets into the car with Ty at his side and watches in the rear view mirror as Mike is lost to the trees of Epping Forest. The last few sparks of their relationship die out over the phone, choice words shouted into receivers, aimed to tear each other apart. Bragi is iron cast and Anders doesn’t feel a thing.  
  
Ty takes to running. He runs for miles through central London, never stopping, never slowing down. He turns up at Anders’ door on a weekly basis, exhausted and soaked through, his bright eyes dulled to navy, dark enough to match the sky. Anders leads him into the bedroom, unlaces his scuffed, worn shoes and allows him to collapse back into bed. He’s asleep before he can even adjust the duvet.  
  
Sometimes, when he wakes he doesn’t leave. Instead he sits curled at Anders’ side, holding a cup of tea that he never drinks and they watch old films that neither of them have any interest in. “Do you think there’s a way to make it stop?” He asks, glazed eyes reflecting the light of the television.  
  
Anders looks down, cards his fingers through his hair and wonders who, of the two of them, has more to lose. “There could be,” he says, in the end. “And if there is, we’ll find it.” Ty nods like he doesn’t quite believe him. He used to think Anders could fix everything, if he would just try. Perhaps he’s lost that as well.  
  
He doesn’t see Axl at all anymore. Mike has taken responsibility, stepping in like he’d been there all along. As he cups Ty’s pale hands in his, trying to bring some of the warmth back to his fingertips, Anders is grateful for the distance. Maybe, if he’s lucky, there’s a chance he won’t have to watch this happen a second time.    
  
—  
  
Anders is almost thirty. He runs a small PR company on the sixth floor of a building in Southbank. He meets Ty for dinner every Thursday night at the same Asian fusion restaurant, and they sit by the window and watch the tourists take pictures of Tower Bridge from the edge of the Thames. He hasn’t spoken to Mike in three years, and by proxy he hasn’t spoken to Axl in far longer. Ty keeps him updated, tells him which subjects he struggles in, shows him photos on his mobile, and sometimes it feels like enough.  
  
They sit on the slightly damp stone benches outside of City Hall and watch the lights. Ty never feels the cold, and Anders would never deny him anything.  
  
“I have a question,” he begins, courteous as always, giving him a chance to opt out.  
  
“Shoot.”  
  
“Have you ever considered going back to New Zealand?”  
  
Anders leans on his palms and watches the fountains spray icy mist over dark stone. “I own London,” he says. “Why the fuck would I leave?”  
  
“Because you hate it here,” he offers with a slight smile and then he tilts his head, as if to double check. “Haven’t you always?”    
  
“I don’t hate it, Ty.” It’s true, he doesn’t. What he remembers of New Zealand is what he remembers of being a child. It was blissful, sunny ignorance. London is his now, with its constantly changing weather, its grey colour palette and crowded, stuffy tubes.  
  
He smiles like he doesn’t believe him. “That’s alright then. I’m not sure New Zealand would suit me, anyway.”  
  
Anders thinks about watching him run in his little velcro shoes. “It would,” he assures him. “Had we stayed, it would.”  
  
—  
  
The next time he sees him he is as sober as he’s ever been, scrubbing at his eyes as Mike snaps at him over the phone. “It’s his twenty-first tomorrow. We’re going to Epping and I expect you to be there.”  
  
“Make sure Ty picks me up before heading out and I will be. But I’m certainly not taking the train.”  
  
“Anders.” The way he says his name, a combination of disgust and exhaustion, hasn’t changed at all in four years. Bragi hums to Chopin’s Funeral March and Anders does his best to ignore him.  
  
“I’ll be there, okay?” He doesn’t quite catch Mike’s response because just across the street he sees a man in a long coat and black curled hair step into a corner pub, pulling the door shut behind him. Anders’ breath catches in his chest because even from a distance it’s his eyes that convince him. “I have to go.”  
  
Anders nearly stumbles over his own feet in his rush to follow. His mind is white static and he pauses just outside the door, straightening his tie, catching his breath. The man from the lock would be in his forties by now, but Anders learned long ago that he can live with disappointment, he can live without the sun, so he opens the door.  
  
He is sitting at a table in the back, an untouched pint of Guinness in front of him and a smart phone in hand. He looks young and Anders feels ancient. His eyes are the same painted hazel, his hair still a windswept mess of curls. He doesn’t look up from his phone until Anders is pulling out a chair and taking the seat across from him.  
  
“Did you ever go back to Gaeshill?” He asks.  
  
His eye are wide, an expression Anders can’t quite read even with Bragi’s lips at his ear. “Excuse me?”  
  
“You said you hadn’t been there in years and years. Did you ever go back?”  
  
“No,” he says, barely more than a whisper. “No, I haven’t been back.” He won’t look him in the eye, instead he watches the bartender as she smiles indulgently at a group of German tourists. “I’m sorry,” he says, finally.  
  
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” Anders assures him. People have lives outside of boys who hide in the Camden locks.    
  
“You look like you turned out alright though, in the end, didn’t you?”  
  
“Well enough.” Anders does his best to smile. “Tell me your name.”  
  
“Mitchell,” he says. Bragi imprints every letter onto the backs of his eyelids.  
  
“Anders,” he offers in return. He does look at him then. He studies him, every line accounted for, every detail. He opens his mouth to say something, and closes it with a click of his teeth.  
  
“You don’t have to explain if you don’t want to.”  
  
“I’m sorry,” he says again, but Anders cuts him off with a wave of his hand.  
  
“Don’t- just let me get a drink, okay? And don’t go running from me while my back is turned.”  
  
“I won’t,” he promises and Anders believes him.  
  
They stay until well after most people have left, until the bartender begins scrubbing down tables and stacking chairs under the harsh glare of the overhead lights. They talk about Ireland and Anders’ PR business and the proper way to pour a beer.  
  
“No, no,” Mitchell says, slapping his hands away. “Let the expert show you. Jesus.”  
  
“You’re pretentious, that’s what you are. It will taste the same either way.” But Anders lets him pour it anyway, his elbows resting on the table, smiling into his palm.  
  
Anders tells him about Axl, tells him he’s turning twenty-one and he hasn’t seen him since he was seventeen, hasn’t lived with him since he was barely more than a child, excitable and bright as the sun. Mitchell lists off nearly two dozen Greek deities with a look of absolute triumph and he laughs until tears pool at the corners of his eyes because he memorised more than even Anders remembers.  
  
They complain about Shoreditch and the weather, quintessential pastimes, and they both breathe a sigh of relief to find neither of them gives a fuck about football. “What’s the appeal, even?” Mitchell asks, shaking his head. “It’s just loads of running back and forth. Never understood it.”  
  
By the time the bartender politely asks them to leave, they’re both pleasantly drunk, their arms brushing together as they walk. He is shivering in his thin suit jacket, but Mitchell still doesn’t seem to mind the cold.  
  
Mitchell presses their hands together and breathes clouds of warm air over their entwined fingers. “You should invest in some gloves.”    
  
“It’s almost spring,” he says. “Back to mine?”  
   
He pauses, but doesn’t let go of his hands. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”  
  
Anders is no where near sober enough to censor his murmur of, “I think you’re going to disappear.”  
  
“I ought to.”  
  
“Please don’t.”  
  
“Give me your phone.” Mitchell holds them side by side and calls his own mobile, adding Anders’ number before handing it back. “I work at St. George’s Hospital. I live in Balham. You have my number.”  
  
“If you don’t call me, next time I run into you I’ll make you regret it.”  
  
Mitchell smiles and Anders’ chest aches. “I promise,” he says.  
  
—  
  
He wakes with just a hint of a headache and he thinks for a moment that it may have all been a dream. Despite the smell of cigarette smoke that lingers on his clothes, despite the echoing pitch of his voice, he’s convinced Bragi could have written it from scratch. He doesn’t have the time to dwell, to scrub his face with his hands and groan into his palms because it is quarter to nine and someone is at the door.  
  
“Jesus fucking Christ, Ty. Why are you up at this unholy hour?”  
  
“I’ve been up since six,” he tells him, shoving his way inside. “We have to leave soon though, if we want to be there by noon. So go on, jump in the shower and let’s go. I can smell pub on you.”  
  
“Go where?” He rubs at his eyes with the heels of his palms.  
  
“It’s Axl’s birthday, Anders. Come on. You know this.”  
  
He sighs. Mitchell and his wandering hands, his warm breath, left everything else to the wayside of his memory. “And I absolutely have to go to this?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“Fine, go make me some tea.”  
  
They spend the drive there taking bets on Axl’s fate. Anders thinks he must be Dellingr, the sunrise, constant and young and soft to the touch.

“Well, yeah I think you’re probably right,” Ty says, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel.  
  
“You’re not meant to agree with me, Ty. It’s a bet. You have to pick someone else. Otherwise you’re just going to owe me dinner regardless.” He almost never makes him pay, but Anders likes to keep score.  
  
“I can’t think of any that even remotely fit.”  
  
“Just pick one.”  
  
Ty laughs, shaking his head. “Odin,” he says.  
  
Anders snorts, kicking his feet up onto the dashboard. “I am going to order the most expensive bottle of wine they have next Thursday. You better start saving. By the way, is Olaf already here?”  
  
“He’s not coming this time.” It begins to rain, a soft mist against the windshield. “It’s surf season in New Zealand, he said he’d call in.”  
  
Anders rolls his eyes. “Does it even work like that?”  
  
“I guess we’ll find out.”  
  
—  
  
They don’t wait until Thursday. Instead Anders orders them filet mignon from a restaurant in Soho and they split a bottle of Spanish red between them. “I should be buying you fucking champagne,” he says, pouring him a glass. “But that would pair terribly with the steak.”  
  
Ty shakes his head like he still can’t quite believe it and Anders empties his glass before the waiter can get a word in. “Fucking Odin,” he sighs. “This definitely puts the myths into perspective.” They don’t say much more than that until their food finally comes, and after a bite or two Ty seems to find his voice.  
  
“Poor kid,” he says.  
  
“Really? Poor Axl? Our lives are contingent on him not fucking up and you and I both have seen him do unspeakably stupid things.” Ty opens his mouth to respond but Anders waves him off. “That part is not up for debate.”  
  
“No, I know. It’s just- it’s a lot, I mean, a lot more to deal with. A lot more to handle. Don’t you remember what it was like, turning twenty-one?”    
  
Anders remembers vindication, the puzzle pieces sliding into place. But he knows well enough what it is that Ty remembers. “Yeah,” he says. “I remember a hell of a lot of sex.”  
  
“You’re the luckiest of all of us,” Ty tells him, but he's smiling and shaking his head and they both know it’s not quite true. “But we’ll work this out anyway, between the four of us we’ll manage.”  
  
Anders finishes off the last of his wine. “Count me out. If I’m going to die when Axl inevitably swan dives drunk from a rooftop then I’m going to go ahead and spend the remainder of my life eating steak.”  
  
“Well,” Ty says. “I can’t argue with that.”  
  
—  
  
He wakes properly hungover with Ty asleep in bed beside him, still fully dressed, and with his phone wedged beneath his pillow, vibrating in staccato bursts. He squints blearily at the screen, letting it ring for just a moment before he finally answers.  
  
“You called,” he says, his voice rough with sleep. Ty shifts at his side, turning onto his stomach.  
  
“Yeah alright, don’t act too surprised.” Bragi is wide awake in the seconds it takes for Mitchell’s falling cadence to whisper through the receiver. “I was just calling to see how interested you’d be in visiting your old stomping grounds tonight. Though you sound suspiciously hungover.”  
  
“I am nearly always hungover.” Ty is now groaning into his pillow for Anders to shut his fucking mouth. He reaches over and teases his fingers though his brother’s hair. It's short and soft and surprisingly free of product and Ty hums in sleepy approval.  
  
“Well then I’m sure Camden Town won’t do you in. I’ll see you at eight?”  
  
“See you at eight,” he agrees. He never did visit the little Italian bistro that overlooked the lock. Of course, it’s not there anymore, hasn’t been for years. Now it’s a trendy, overpriced Mexican bar where kids drink too much tequila and order meals they can’t pronounce.  
  
“Who was it?” Ty mumbles.  
  
“Your hair’s too short,” he says, carding over the nape of his neck. “I preferred it when you kept it a bit long.”  
  
“You used to call me shaggy.”  
  
“Yeah,” Anders agrees. “But I think I preferred it.”  
  
—  
  
Anders feels like he hasn’t spoken in anything but Bragi’s voice and business deals for the better part of a decade. He leans against the gate over the lock, now short and stylish and painted forest green, and thinks that he may have forgotten how to speak altogether.  
  
Camden Town is full of students, filling up the sidewalks, crowding out the weekend markets. Part of him was all too happy to see the boarded council buildings renovated and torn out, the broken windows replaced with double pane glass. The rest of him wants only the mausoleum of city life that he had as a child.  
  
“It looks just the same,” Mitchell says, stopping to lean beside him.  
  
“Really? Because I don’t recognise a single thing.” Anders doesn’t look at him, doesn’t turn to see the way his eyes shine under the street lights, because he’s not sure his lungs can handle the pressure.  
  
“Things don’t change as much as you think they do.” He holds up a plastic bag, his offering of takeout. “Couldn’t find decent Indian around here though, so it’s Lebanese. Also I definitely underestimated the amount of people that would be out on a Sunday night so we may have to forgo jumping the fence.”  
  
Anders smiles, shaking his head. “Come on,” he says, and Mitchell follows. He leads him to the little patch of green in St. Martin’s Garden, pulling at the rusted latch until the gate falls open to dried grass and dying willow trees. They sit on an old park bench and Mitchell hands him containers of lentils and rice. He picks out the peas and tosses them to the ground while Anders watches.  
  
“I guess you’re right, some things definitely don’t change.”  
  
“Give me a break, I just really hate peas.”  
  
They eat in silence, Anders pushes rice around with the edge of his plastic fork until finally he asks, “How long are you staying this time?”  
  
“I don’t know. It’s not really- I just got here, actually. Moved from Bristol.” He doesn’t respond and finally Mitchell sighs, setting his food aside, and turns to face him. “Are you going to ask me any questions or are you just going to pretend to be totally cool with this?”  
  
“Eventually,” he says. Right now Anders feels a little bit like he’s on another bad trip, a chemically flawed hit of ecstasy that left him dizzy and uncertain, stuck half way out of vivid, early morning dreams.  
  
“Did you see your brother yesterday?”  
  
“I saw all of them.” He pauses. “Do you want to get absolutely pissed?”  
  
“Yeah,” Mitchell says after a moment. “That’s a fucking fantastic idea.”  
  
—  
  
They end up outside of his flat as Anders struggles with the lock and Mitchell leans against the wall, watching with low lidded eyes. He finally wedges the door open and tosses his keys onto the floor before tugging Mitchell in after him.  
  
“So this might be weird for you,” Anders says, his lips against his ear. “Because you knew me as a kid and everything but I’m really pretty into the idea of you fucking me tonight, so-”  
  
Mitchell kisses like he doesn’t need to breathe, like he could pull the oxygen from his lungs if he tried and Anders fists his hands in the sleeves of his jacket as he pulls him closer. This he is familiar with, this is territory he knows very well. Anders has imagined the way Mitchell would taste, the feeling of his tongue against the seam of his lips, licking into his mouth. But this isn’t slow and meticulous, it’s just slightly feral. Bragi sings epitaphs to fallen warriors old.  
  
Mitchell bites at his bottom lip, hard enough to pull a gasp from his throat but not hard enough to bleed. Anders tugs at the front of his black button up as Mitchell mouths at his neck, whispering inaudibly against his skin, a slow drag of his lips until he’s kissing him again. Anders abandons his shirt in favour of grabbing at his belt and undoing the buckle with a loud metallic click. It sounds like an echo over the soft tone of their breathing and like a broken spell, Mitchell steps back. He's disheveled, with red lips and mussed hair, his shirt left open, tanned skin on display. For a moment, in a trick of light, his eyes look black.  
  
“Anders,” he breathes his name. “We shouldn’t be doing this.”  
  
He has waited fifteen years for this man and he’ll be damned if he lets him walk away. He steps forward, hooking his fingers in the edge of his waistband, and draws him closer with a hand pressed to the nape of his neck. Mitchell’s eyes flutter closed.

“Why not?” Anders doesn’t expect an answer. Instead he rests his fingers against Mitchell’s parted lips and presses into his mouth, pushing against his tongue. “I’m most definitely an adult now.”

He pulls back, tries to step away but Anders tightens his hold. “That’s really not the problem. Not even close. I barely know you.”  
  
“Is there any better way to get to know each other?”  
  
Mitchell presses his nose to his hair, inhaling just above his ear. “I have to go,” he whispers.  
  
“You really don’t.” He thinks of letting Bragi speak for him, pushing his voice past his lips until Mitchell has no other choice, but they both seem to know that it’s a bad idea. So Anders lets him pull away, lets him button his shirt and run a hand through his hair.    
  
“I’ll call you,” Mitchell tells him.  
  
“I don’t believe you.”  
  
Mitchell kisses him before he goes, barely a peck on the corner of his mouth, and Anders thinks he might hate him for it.  
  
—  
  
“Anders, we could use your help.” Ty is sitting on the edge of his desk, watching as he flips idly through the last few pages of a contract without reading a single word. “We’ve no clue where to start and you at least have connections of some sort.”  
  
“If you want hot models or free drinks I’m your man. Otherwise, I’m not sure-”  
  
“Any kind of help would do. You’re part of this family too, you know.”  
  
“Really?” He asks, looking up at him. “Have you run that past Mike recently?”  
  
“Anders,” he sighs his name in the same soft way that he always does. Ty doesn’t take sides, that was his lesson learned in childhood. He is neutral and fair and gets along with each of them just as well as the last. Anders can’t bring himself to mind.  
  
“Listen, work’s really been piling up recently. I don’t have time for brainstorming. If you lot come up with something specific you need me for, you know my number. Otherwise,“ he shrugs. “There’s not much I can do.”

Ty knows he’s lying, that under his little stack of paperwork is a tablet that he'd been reading trashy headlines from when he first walked in the door. “Are we still on for dinner on Thursday?”

It’s his white flag, and Anders happily accepts it. “Aren’t we always?”  
  
—  
  
Anders calls Mitchell with seven grams of weed flown straight from the Netherlands and a pack of rolling paper in his pocket. They haven’t spoken since he left his flat the week before but Anders has long since decided that when it comes to Mitchell, he’ll take what he can get. “When are you out of work?” He asks.  
  
“Half ten.” He sounds reasonably apprehensive. “Why?”  
  
“I’ll meet you outside.”  
  
Mitchell is wearing his usual threadbare jacket over a pair of sky blue scrubs and Anders can’t help but smile at the sight. “Where’re we going?”  
  
“You tell me. I need a park.”  
  
Mitchell leads him down the street to a fenced in cemetery with the gate left open, lined with flowers just beginning to bloom. There is an old willow tree with low hanging branches, massive and ancient, and it calls to Bragi like a siren song.

“Here,” he says, dragging Mitchell underneath it, looking up at the light polluted sky through the gaps in its thin branches. “This’ll do.”  
  
He sits, pulling an opaque plastic bag from his pocket. He begins rolling one of his more conservative joints, tightly packed and perfectly even, while Mitchell watches him with a wide grin.  
  
“You serious?”  
  
“Fuck yeah, I am.” He looks up as he licks the edge of the paper. “What?”  
  
Mitchell laughs, shaking his head. “You’re the most meticulous roller I’ve ever seen.”    
  
“Practice,” he says. “Hand me your lighter.”  
  
They take turns, passing the joint back and forth between their lips, leaning against the thin bark of the willow.

“I haven’t gotten high in ages,” Mitchell tells him.  
  
“Well you are missing out.” While Mitchell takes a drag, Anders runs the lighter over the edge of a crumpled leaf, watching it furl into itself like the walls of the Hindenburg.  
  
“That is how people end up setting fires to church yards, you know,” Mitchell says, watching him.  
  
He stamps out the leaf under the heel of his loafers. “Too wet for that.” He feels the slightest buzz in the back of his head, like Bragi is running his fingers up and down harp strings. “As soon as this thing is finished we’re getting some fucking chips.”  
  
Mitchell snorts into his sleeve. “You’re such a stereotype. We’re not getting high outside of a church and then going for fish and chips. I won't allow it, not when there’s a great kebab shop just down the road.”  
  
Anders frowns, unconvinced. “If I get food poisoning I’m going to kill you.”  
  
“I’ll risk it,” Mitchell tells him with a grin and Anders finds himself smiling back.    
  
—  
  
When he was a kid, Mitchell would ask him questions about school, quiz him on his maths scores, guess at his favourite films. He always listened with such genuine curiosity, a level of attention Anders wasn’t used to receiving. He put it off to loneliness, the lasting impression of Mitchell’s questioning tone. But now he realises that it’s just the way he is.  
  
Mitchell wants every detail, devours every word like he’s searching for metaphors, the meaning to life in between stories of failed conquests and family disputes. Sometimes, it feels like not much has changed. They spend their weekends getting wasted, asking each other outrageous questions and attempting to answer with straight faces.  
  
“Most orgasms you’ve managed in a single encounter?”  
  
Mitchell groans into his hands. “Why’s it always sex with you?”  
  
“It’s what I know,” he says with a shrug. He plays with the end of a black straw, idly stirring the dregs of his gin and tonic.  
  
“I’m not answering that.”  
  
“Prude.”  
  
“A man needs his secrets.” Anders snorts and Mitchell grins around the rim of his glass. “Come on,” he says. “Finish that up. I’m buying the next round.”

He dutifully tips back the rest of his drink while Mitchell retreats to the bar and orders for him. He never asks and Anders never gives any instruction, but he’s managed well enough so far. He returns with a rum and coke and it reminds him of sixth form, of getting black out drunk and coming back to himself on the dance floor.  
  
“My turn,” he says.  
  
“You didn’t even answer my question.”  
  
Mitchell ignores him. “Religious?”  
  
Anders looks up at him, eyebrows raised. “Really?”  
  
“Alright fine. Childhood religion?”  
  
Anders’ relationship with religion, before the age of twenty-one, was one of happy ignorance. He knew the stories of old gods, read from flimsy books as a child, though he barely scraped through the mandatory religion classes at school. As a teenager, he thought of religion as the side effect of good story telling. He wonders if this counts as irony. “We were blessedly agnostic. What about you, tall, dark and Irish? Surely you were a good little Catholic.”  
  
“The best,” Mitchell answers. “Until I turned thirteen and discovered the opposite gender. And then shortly after I discovered my own gender. I wasn’t picky. Supposedly God doesn’t approve.”  
  
“Such a killjoy, that.”  
  
Mitchell grins. “Yeah, who needs him?”  
  
—  
  
As weeks go by, Bragi begins to adapt to Mitchell’s Irish inflection. It works its way into his own tones, his sentences begin to fall high where they should be low, his cadence just a little off to his own ears. He never tried to hold on to the vowels of New Zealand, instead he fell to a south London drawl before settling on something blissfully neutral. Sometimes, when he hears Mike over the phone, he wishes he hadn’t.  
  
Anders attempts to maneuver between the crowd of people who have taken refuge from the rain, filling out a pub like only the weather can. He juggles two pints with his card held between his teeth and just manages to get to their table before some Guinness slops over the side, splashing onto Mitchell’s jeans.    
  
“Typical English,” he says, rolling his eyes and reaching for a napkin to pat out the stain. “Can’t even hold their liquor, much less carry it.”  
  
Anders looks at him for a moment, considering. “You do know I’m not English though, right?”  
  
Mitchell sighs. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those kids born on the Welsh boarder who seem to think they have a claim to it.”  
  
“Really? Your first thought was Wales?” Anders takes a lingering, mournful drink. “No, I’m from New Zealand.”  
  
“Well you certainly don’t sound it.”  
  
“State schools have a way of fixing that. The last thing anyone wants at ten years old is to be the token Kiwi fruit, trust me.”  
  
Mitchell leans back, tipping his chair while keeping one foot balanced against the floor. “New Zealand, huh? Do you go back often?”  
  
“I haven’t been back once.” Mike and Axl have both gone for visits over summer breaks, a stray Christmas or two spent on the beach. Ty stays because he fears he’ll hate the sun and the heat and the mild winters. Anders is afraid he’ll never want to leave, that Bragi will sink in roots and grow without him and this time it’ll be the clouds he loses.  
  
“Any particular reason why?” Mitchell knows a bit about leaving home, and he smiles at Anders like he can guess at every word.  
  
“No time,” he says.  
  
Mitchell shrugs. “Maybe one day you can take a holiday.”  
  
“Yeah, maybe one day.”  
  
—  
  
He did mean to ask him eventually. Anders knows just how many stories are sewn up behind his lips and every night he thinks of pulling at one of the loose threads and every night he decides against it. They’re either drinking in old pubs or watching shit television or eating takeout on his living room floor and inevitably Anders thinks, why ruin this? So he doesn’t ask a single question and Mitchell never brings it up. Sometimes, things almost feel normal.  
  
London is beginning a tentative dance around spring weather, a wave of humidity mixed with constant, misting rain and Mitchell wins over his mid-afternoon sulk by coming to his office with burgers and chips. “I won’t be around this weekend. Consider this my apology.”  
  
“Where’re you headed?” He asks.  
  
Mitchell has his feet kicked up onto his desk and is shoving chips into his mouth, one by one. “Goin’ to Bristol,” he says.  
  
“What’s in Bristol?”  
  
“Just some people I know.”  
  
“People as in friends?” Anders traces through a smudge of ketchup with his fingertip.  
  
“Definitely not friends."  
  
“John Mitchell,” he says idly. “You’re a terrible liar.”  
  
“I’m not lying. They’re not friends.” He hears a tone of hurt in his voice, something like regret.  
  
“Not anymore, you mean.” Anders isn’t sure why he’s pushing, why he won’t let it go, but Bragi is just as uncomfortable as he is, stirring in the back of his head. It sets him on edge.  
  
“What are you getting at?” Mitchell asks, pulling his feet away, sitting up straight.  
  
“Who are you going to see?”  
  
Mitchell’s brows are drawn together, his jaw is clenched and he looks, for just a moment, like the old paintings of archangel Raphael, the kind he would see on school trips, that he would glance over and commit to memory. Anders stands suddenly and pulls him into a kiss. Mitchell’s tongue curls around his for the the span of a breath before he shoves him away, hard enough for him to stumble backwards, barely catching himself on the edge of his desk.  
  
Mitchell looks up at him with wide eyes, an apology ready on his lips, but his assistant gets there first. “Is everything okay?” She holds a stack of papers against her chest, watching them.  
  
“Everything’s fine,” he says, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.  
  
“Anders-” she begins but he shakes his head, his patience hanging in scraps at his side. He allows Bragi into his lungs, and exhales.  
  
“How about you go and get us both coffee? You deserve a break, you’ve been working way too hard. And when you get there, maybe stop for that croissant you’ve been craving.” Her eyes glaze over and Anders smiles. “Thanks, you’re the best. And don’t worry about the contracts, I’ve got it covered.”  
  
“Right,” she says quietly, before collecting her coat and reaching for the door.     
  
Mitchell is watching him, eyes wide, fingers gripping the arms of his chair. “What was that?” He asks, his voice low.  
  
“What?”  
  
“That?” He gestures at the door. “Don’t bullshit me Anders. How did you do it?” Mitchell is a caged animal, every muscle taught, his jaw clenched. For a moment, he looks like he might be afraid.  
  
“It’s just something I can do,” he says, collapsing back into his chair. “It’s not as bad as it looks. More of a very strong suggestion than anything, I couldn’t make you swan dive off the roof if that’s what you’re worried about. And now, I guess it’s finally your turn. Most people can’t tell when I do it so-” he waves a hand imperiously. “Talk away, Dorian.”  
  
“I’m a vampire.”  
  
Anders snorts, leaning back in his chair until he can see the speckled white of the ceiling. Mitchell is silent across from him. “Oh wait, were you being serious?”  
  
He nods, slowly, watching him with a wary expression.  
  
“Oh. Right. A vampire?” He pauses, slightly unsure of how to respond. In the end, he goes with the first thing that comes to mind. “Is that why you ran off when I was a kid? You were going to eat me?”  
  
“I hadn’t planed on eating you,” he says with just a hint of a smile. “But I have not been and will never be a particularly good role model. Things tend to end badly for me, so I end them instead.” When he looks up again his eyes are a solid, even black.  
  
Anders watches him for a moment before he stands, pulling Mitchell up with him, and leads him to the couch. He straddles his lap, cups his cheeks in his hands and whispers, “Do it again.”  
  
He traces his fingers along his temple and Mitchell holds his gaze. He’s always had such beautiful eyes but this, Anders thinks, is stunning. Bragi drags his mind to constellations, to winter’s night sky. He kisses him softly, tentatively, still wary of being pushed away, but instead Mitchell wraps his arms around his waist and pulls him flush against his chest. Anders sighs into his mouth and Mitchell digs his fingers into his shoulder blades and when finally he pulls away his eyes have faded back to brown.  
  
“I have a very hard time separating sex and violence,” he says softly, entwining their fingers.  
  
“Do you want to bite me?” It’s curiosity, not an offer, and Mitchell looks away.  
  
“Not yet. But I’m afraid I will.”  
  
Anders watches his eyes flick between his wrists and his neck and he wonders how many people he’s killed. “Eventually, I’ll want to know more.”  
  
“Just ask,” Mitchell says, leaning forward and resting his forehead against Anders’ shoulder. “And I’ll tell you everything.”  
  
—  
  
Mitchell is gone for the better part of four days, and in that time Anders thinks of enough questions to fill a book. He wants to know what blood tastes like to him, if it keeps its metallic bite or if it turns to something sweet, nectar in his mouth. He wants to know if he would choose mortality, if it was ever his choice to make. He wants to know how many people have loved him, and how many he has left behind.  
  
Instead, when he turns up on his doorstep, shuffling his feet on the mat, Anders can only think of a single thing to ask. “How many years has it been since you’ve been home?”  
  
“Ninety-eight.” He doesn’t stop to count. His answer seems innate, like an internal clock.  
  
He should ask the name of the last person he killed, he should ask what it is he is running from. Instead he says, “I’m ordering pizza and you don’t get a say on toppings.”  
  
Mitchell follows him as he edges around the counter to his drawer devoted to takeout menus and rests a hand against his shoulder blade. “You don’t have to be afraid to ask me questions, you know.”

He’s never once been scared of Mitchell, but he can’t help but feel something akin to fear for what he might have to say. “I’m not,” he says and Mitchell doesn’t push it. Anders remembers the Tower of London, the writing carved into stone walls, and he decides that he doesn’t want to know Mitchell’s secrets, not a single one.  
  
—  
  
Mitchell kisses him easily, with barely a thought. Sometimes it’s chaste, a greeting or a goodbye, sometimes he lingers with barely parted lips, and sometimes it’s hungry and rushed and leaves Anders gasping for breath. He never takes it any further, no matter how many encouragements Anders whispers into his ear or how quickly he manages to unbutton his jeans without him noticing.  
  
Anders takes out his sexual frustration on women he pulls from clubs in Elephant and Castle. He preys on Brixton’s easy street crowd with too much red lipstick and high, high heels, girls that are impressed when he pays for a black cab home. Sometimes he doubts he even needs to use Bragi, but he never takes the chance. It’s just so much easier to smile against their lips and watch them follow on an invisible lead.  
  
There is a beautiful university student asleep in his bed when he wakes to a knock on his door. She is slightly younger than his taste generally runs, but she has olive dark skin and black hair and Anders was just a little enchanted by the way she smiled and he can’t bring himself to regret it.  
  
She shifts in her sleep as he climbs out of bed, slipping on a pair of sweatpants and closing the bedroom door behind him. He rubs at his eyes, expecting the delivery man with a package from the office, but instead he opens the door to Mitchell digging through his pockets with a sausage and egg sandwich wedged in his mouth.  
  
“Morning,” he says, taking a bite and sliding past him into the sitting room. “Thought I lost my wallet. All clear. Brought breakfast.”  
  
“Uh,” he begins, but Anders can already hear movement from his bedroom, the steady click of heels on hardwood. Mitchell looks at him, his head tilted to the side, just as the door opens behind him.  
  
“Hello,” she says, smiling politely at them both. She looks remarkably put together, dressed in last night’s clothing. “It was lovely to meet you Anders, thanks for letting me crash for the night. I have class early tomorrow so I better hit the road. I’ll see myself out.” She kisses his cheek and is gone before either of them can say a word otherwise.  
  
Mitchell turns to him with raised eyebrows. “What was she, sixteen?”  
  
“Definitely closer to twenty,” he says, wandering into the kitchen and flicking the switch on the kettle. Mitchell doesn’t follow him, instead he stays where he is and watches with narrowed eyes.  
  
“Tea?” He asks but Mitchell doesn’t answer. “You just going to stand there or-“  
  
“Oh, sorry, was I supposed to not be surprised that a fucking child just walked out of your bedroom at ten in the morning?” He snaps.  
  
“Oh fuck off Mitchell, she was in her third year at uni.” He pulls two mugs down from the cabinet.    
  
“That’s really not the point.”  
  
“Then what is?” He turns, curious, with Bragi beginning to rake oxygen over the coals in his chest. “Are you unhappy that I’m sleeping around?” Mitchell looks away, his hands clenched to fists at his sides and Anders smiles. “Would you have preferred it if I spent the night with a guy I picked up in Leicester? I did, you know, three days ago. He fucked me so hard I could hardly-“  
  
Mitchell grabs his wrist and pins him back against the fridge, digging his fingers into his skin. He doesn't let go, not even when Anders drops his mug and it shatters to pieces across the floor. His eyes are black and Anders can almost make out his own reflection when he leans in close to whisper, “Don’t fucking taunt me.”  
  
“Taunt you? You’ve spent the last month leading me on you absolute prick. Just because you appear to be celibate doesn’t mean I have to be. I don’t owe you anything.”  
  
Mitchell bares his teeth. “I can smell her on you.”  
  
“Yeah? Then why don’t you do something about it?”  
  
He pulls Anders close and kisses him like he belongs to him. He bites at his lips and digs his fingernails into the nape of his neck. Anders groans into his mouth as Mitchell drags him into the bedroom, not bothering to shut the door. He pushes him back against the mattress, where the sheets still smell of sex and body heat, it only seems to fuel his hunger. His black eyes are unwavering now as he pulls his shirt over his head and climbs on top of him.  
  
“Tell you me you want this,” he says, his voice low.  
  
“Oh, I definitely want this.”  
  
Mitchell inhales deeply at his throat. His black eyes flick between his lips and his temple, a last look of apprehension. “I won’t break,” he tells him.  
  
“You might,” Mitchell says, but he is already tugging at his sweatpants, pulling them down below his hips. “I might hurt you.”  
  
“Then hurt me,” Anders says. “Vampire sex is all the rage these days.” Mitchell snorts into his hipbone, tonguing at the base of his navel, drawing away from his cock. Anders groans in frustration.  
  
“Could you please just-“  
  
Mitchell flips him onto his stomach, his left hand pushing on his shoulder, his right trailing down his spine. “You’re very impatient for having just gotten laid last night.”  
  
“I am never patient,” he breathes against the sheets.  
  
“No,” Mitchell agrees as he fists his hand in Anders’ hair. “You’re definitely not.”     
  
“There’s lube and condoms in the bedside table and-" Mitchell kisses him quiet and Anders breathes heavily through his nose, his neck craned to the side. “Out of curiosity,” Anders mumbles into the sheets as Mitchell reaches over him to feel around in the nightstand drawer. “When was the last time you had sex with a guy?”  
  
“About twenty years ago.”  
  
Anders pushes himself up and twists around to look at him. “Seriously?”  
  
“Yeah. Don’t worry, it’s like riding a bike.”  
  
“I’m not sure that metaphor works here.”  
  
He presses his lips to the base of Anders’ spine. “You have very skewed priorities, you know.”  
  
Anders would give nearly anything to see those eyes roll to black. He thinks he’s probably right.     
  
—  
  
It’s surprisingly easy to give up his one night stands when Mitchell spends the entirety of each weekend sprawled beneath his sheets, tracing the outlines of his ribs and pressing his lips to every notch in his spine.  
  
“Do you want to bite me yet?” Anders asks, pressing his thumbnail into the head of his cock, eliciting a choked sound from his beautiful throat. He shakes his head, black hair fanned against the pillow.  
  
“Well that’s a good sign, isn’t it?” He allows Anders’ hands to wander, to part his thighs, press his fingers flat against his perineum. He knows this rare show of compliance will be short lived. Mitchell never sits idle for long.  
  
“It doesn’t mean it won’t happen.”  
  
“And if it does?” Anders asks, shimmying down until his lips graze the jutting line of his hipbone. “Will you kill me?” He pulls the very tip of his cock into his mouth, pressing his tongue hard against his skin.  
  
“I don’t know,” Mitchell whispers, gasping as Anders allows for a touch of teeth.  
  
He pulls back. “But that’s what you’re afraid of.”  
  
Mitchell pushes himself up onto his elbows. “I’m afraid of a hundred different things when I’m with you, Anders. You don’t know the half of it.”  
  
Anders adjusts, he makes concessions, he cuts his losses. There is little he fears beyond Bragi’s inevitable silence and he sees one possible consequence from Mitchell’s lips against his wrists, a linear track with little room for derogation. What Mitchell sees is a series of memories.

“Kiss me,” he whispers, because it’s easier this way.  

—  
  
They are watching reruns of the Real Hustle, but Mitchell has barely glanced at the screen since the opening song first hummed through the speakers. Instead he’s watching Anders, looking him up and down in a constant inspection and Bragi is writhing under the attention.  
  
“There’s a reason this show was canceled you know.”  
  
“That is fucking blasphemy,” Mitchell says, but it lacks his usual spark.  
  
Anders sighs. “Just because I haven’t asked you any questions doesn’t mean I won’t answer yours.”  
  
He seems to hesitate. “Yeah, alright. You want to give a bit of detail other than ‘it’s just something I can do?’”  
  
Anders isn’t sure where to start, how to describe Bragi’s constant presence, his endless silhouette. He’s not quite sure how to separate it all from the intricacies of his childhood, how to explain that it’s not in a god’s nature to be happy. Instead he sighs and stretches out his legs and asks, “How much do you know about Norse mythology?”  
  
Mitchell listens with rapt attention as Anders tells him stories of Ymir’s blood spilled to create the sea, of Odin and his raven flocks, of the nine worlds, branches along the tree of life. “Bragi,” he echoes. “It suits you.”  
  
“It’s not me,” Anders reminds him and Mitchell nods his head, leaning towards him until he's snug against his side.  
  
“When you used to tell me about Greek mythology, I thought- I was never interested in that kind of stuff but you made it sound so real. The God of Poetry,” he says, rubbing his thumb against his temple. “I’ve never heard of anything so fitting.”  
  
They spend the night curled beside each other on the couch, the television set to mute, while Anders tells him all about the gods and their stories. He skips over Njörðr and Freyja, and instead focuses on Loki and Hel and the constant battles waged, the nine worlds hosts to their trenches.  
  
“What about Bragi?”  
  
Anders watches him in the blue glow of the television screen. He is slumped against the cushions, curled to the side. His hair is mussed and his eyes look distant, like he can see his stories play out just beyond Anders’ shoulder. “He had jobs more than most, I think. He didn’t fight, he was a diplomat. He could travel between the worlds to talk people out of running each other through with swords or similar testosterone fuelled bullshit.”  
  
“You’d be a terrible diplomat,” Mitchell tells him.  
  
“I am well aware. He was also a historian, keeper of the stories and poems that make up the world. They’re carved into his tongue, every word, and he keeps them safe.”  
  
“Does it affect your personality?” Mitchell reaches for his hand, tracing the lines in his palm. “Did he chose you because of your stories and your history books or did you love those things because he already had?”  
  
It’s the question none of them quite know the answer to. He hopes he never does. “I don’t know,” he admits.  
  
Mitchell presses his lips to the back of his hand. “Maybe it’s a bit of both.”  
  
—  
  
The sky is a silky sea blue without a hint of clouds when Anders drags Mitchell through Cutty Sark and up towards the hills of Greenwich Park. It is well past closing but they are no strangers to climbing gates.  
  
“Do you know how far this is from Balham? I’m definitely staying at yours tonight.” He has his hands bunched in his pockets with a near permanent scowl between his knit eyebrows. “What the fuck are you doing?” He asks, as Anders pitches his messenger bag over the fence and pulls himself up onto the ledge.  
  
“Waiting on you. Come on. And watch the pointy bits.”  
  
Mitchell sighs and climbs up after him, frowning all the way. He doesn’t say another word as Anders leads him up the hill, past the empty stone halls that line the entrance and up towards the observatory. They make it about half way to the top before Anders decides he’s climbed enough and collapses back onto the grass, pillowing his head on his bag.  
  
Mitchell sits beside him and looks out across the city, his elbows resting on his knees. It’s rare to see him out without a coat, and Anders enjoys the view. “It’s beautiful up here,” he says.  
  
“You’ve never been?”  
  
He shakes his head and Anders smiles. “Well you’re not here to look at the lights.” He tugs on the collar of his shirt, pulling him back to lay beside him. “You’re here to learn the constellations,” he says, pointing up at the sky. Mitchell catches his hand and smiles against his knuckles.    
  
“The Norse constellations?”  
  
“If you want.”  
  
Mitchell laughs, a slightly overwhelmed sound, like he hasn’t seen the stars in a lifetime. “Yeah,” he says. “I do.”  
  
—  
  
Anders sits across from Ty, listening to him wax poetic about his most recent crush. She works in the cafe down the block, she speaks with an eastern European accent and smiles like spring weather. “I think I may really have a shot with her,” he says, and Anders does his best to smile and agree, to offer a bit of unsolicited advice about getting her into bed which makes Ty roll his eyes.  
  
“I’m just not that kind of guy, Anders.” And he isn’t. He’s kind and thoughtful, he notices detail, sees the snowflakes in their eyes.  
  
He remembers Ty’s twenty first birthday with picture clarity. He remembers the look on his face when they returned home to his flat, when he tried his first sip of wine and found he could barely taste a thing. He remembers how he layered himself beneath blankets, pressed against Anders’ side. He’d turned up the heat, running the radiators until the windows fogged and the flat grew unbearable and still Ty sat, curled in bed with his midwinter chill. Ty got used to it eventually, like frostbite he said, it all went numb, but Anders never did.    
  
“Well maybe that’s why you’re still single,” Anders says.  
  
“You’re not exactly the poster boy for relationships.” Ty points at him with his fork.  
  
“And how would you know? I could’ve met my soulmate since I last saw you.”  
  
“You’d tell me if you were seeing someone,” he says, sounding so very confident that Anders almost has the decency to feel guilty.  
  
—  
  
“Why did you ever stop to talk to me?” Anders lays with his ear to his chest, hearing nothing at all.  
  
“Honestly? I thought you were going to fall. Or jump.”  
  
“It’s shallow,” he says, glancing up at him.  
  
“Not that shallow.”  
  
Anders has never once thought of jumping, not a single time. He knows what will happen when he dies, he’s been unconscious, he understands oblivion. Alive, at least, he has stories and shallow locks and Ty’s soft breathing. “So that’s why you kept coming back? To make sure my body wasn’t floating in the bogs?”  
  
“I’ve always liked kids,” he admits, playing with the ends of Anders’ hair. It has grown slightly longer than he generally wears it and he makes a note to get it cut, lest Mitchell’s personal grooming habits begin to rub off on him.  
  
“Yeah?” He whispers, tightening his grip on the duvet.  
  
“I’ve just always got on best with the sad ones, I guess.”  
  
“Were you sad at that age?”  
  
“No,” he says gently. “No, I was the happiest I’ve ever been.”  
  
Mitchell must have known what he was missing, how quickly his skies faded to grey, if for no other reason than he lived in sunlight for far, far longer than Anders ever did. “So you wanted to cheer me up a bit?”  
  
“Did it work?”  
  
He thinks of telling him that it did, that for a single, beautiful stretch of winter, Anders had someone to talk to. Instead he closes his eyes, listens to the lull of traffic in the streets, and hopes that Mitchell forgets the question.  
  
—  
  
He pretends not to notice when Mitchell’s clothes begin to appear in his wardrobe, when his gloves are left on the table by the door. He doesn’t say anything about the various jars of instant coffee that materialise in the cabinets, or the god awful biscuits that Mitchell dunks in his tea. For someone who has lived lifetimes, Mitchell doesn’t seem to like being alone. He begins to spend more and more evenings on Anders’ couch, spends most nights sliding beneath his sheets and playing him with nimble fingers, waking by his side like a painting in the half light.  
  
Anders never played well with others. He shared a flat with a handful of classmates in university, but he spent most of his time doing lines off the stomach of the boy who shared the room next door and waking hungover in alleyways in Brixton. He hardly noticed the people he lived with, except for the girl from Belfast with flowing red hair. She was a very reliable dealer. But after Bragi came along he found he wanted nothing more than his own space. He couldn’t imagine finding someone else’s dishes in his sink, their dirty socks on the floor and hair in the shower. But with Mitchell kissing the skin of his neck, with his fingers drifting down his sternum, he finds himself quite open to the idea.  
  
—  
  
Axl squirms in the seat across from him, his fingers drumming over the arms of his chair. He’s uncomfortable, confined to Anders’ office, the brother he knows only in partialities, and he can see it in his eyes. “Listen,” he says, his voice so much deeper than Anders ever remembered. “I know you don’t want anything to do with this but Mike is driving me crazy.”  
  
Anders snorts, stifling a laugh. “Oh, is our eldest brother being unbearably controlling? Why am I not surprised?”  
  
Axl frowns and looks away, studying the chalk board that lines his back wall. He sees the gears turning. “Ask me,” Anders says.  
  
“What happened between you two?”  
  
Axl grew up blessedly removed from the storm cloud that sits over their family and Anders isn’t about to change that. “He thought I was a bad influence,” he says, leaning back in his chair. “He didn’t want me showing up high or for one of you to walk in while I was eating pussy on the couch.”  
  
Axl wrinkles his nose. “But that was before Bragi.”  
  
“My darling brother. I was fun well before Bragi came along. Now, because you’ve made the trip here, I’ll offer you some sage advice. Despite ourselves as evidence to the contrary, gods and goddesses don’t tend to leave New Zealand. If you’re on a treasure hunt, it had better start in Auckland.”  
  
—  
  
Mitchell shows up at his flat at a quarter past eight and Anders is already half way through a bottle of wine. He steps inside, plucking the glass from Anders’ fingers and downs the whole of it in one go.  
  
“Rough day?” Anders asks, returning to the kitchen for another glass while Mitchell pulls off his boots.  
  
“People are honestly disgusting.”  
  
Anders pauses, considering, before he pulls another bottle from underneath the cabinet. He fills their glasses nearly to the brim, and Mitchell snorts, shaking his head. “Rough day?” He repeats, as Anders collapses back onto the couch. He leaves Mitchell just enough room to settle on the other end before he sets his feet in his lap.  
  
“Axl came to visit.”  
  
Mitchell hums against the rim. “What did he want?”  
  
“Boring stuff. He did ask me about Mike, though.” Mitchell knows the basics, gathered in bits and pieces, anecdotes and vague timelines. He rubs his thumb along the arch of his foot, a gesture of sympathy. “He wanted to know what happened, why I left.”  
  
“What’d you tell him?”  
  
“I said he kicked me out because I was messing with drugs, which is partially true.” He swallows his wine so quickly he barely tastes it at all. He buried ten years worth of resentment, let it freeze over until his bitterness turned to permafrost and Anders almost forgot about it altogether. But something in the way Mitchell looks at him makes him want to burn it all down.  
  
“I didn’t mention that he turned twenty-one and fucking disappeared for weeks at a time.” Anders finishes the rest of the wine, his head tilted back as he swallows. “Weeks, leaving a fucking teenager to take care of a goddamn toddler. Sometimes I wasn’t even sure he would come back. And Ty would cry and cry because he missed our mother and he stopped sleeping unless it was in my bed, kept it up until the day Mike kicked me out.”  
  
Mitchell crawls forward, settles at his side with an arm wrapped around his shoulder. “I knew every little thing about Axl. I knew every moment of his life because I was there for all of them, and I worked so hard-“ he stops, unable to speak past the ice in his throat. Bragi glows molten as Mitchell presses his lips to his temple. “I didn’t want him to end up like me,” he says, finally. “Like any of us. He was the only one who had a chance. And now he barely remembers.”  
  
Mitchell pulls him into his arms, allows him to lean back against his chest. He unfurls Anders’ fists and traces patterns onto his palms, fractals and tree branches and letters of an alphabet that he doesn’t quite recognise. They stay like this until Anders’ eyes begin to close and his breathing evens out.  
  
“You’ve done so well,” he whispers in his ear. “Now come on, let’s go to bed.”  
  
—  
  
Mitchell leaves coffee rings on the white painted ledge of his window sill. He traces one with his finger and thinks of scrubbing it away but in the end he leaves them be. They overlap and accumulate, creating a signature of Mitchell’s mornings spent by his side, smiling around the rim of a mug, leaving them to fog up the window, to turn lukewarm as he presses Anders back into the sheets, laughing into his skin.  
  
More and more often he wakes to the smell of a cheap, burnt blend and the sound of a teaspoon against the ceramic edge of his mug. Anders never really craved caffeine, kind of like he never craved nicotine. But sometimes, when Mitchell kisses him, he finds himself partial to the taste.  
  
“Coffee?” Mitchell asks, leaning against the doorway. He asks every morning and every morning Anders tells him to fuck off and let him sleep. The rings on his windowsill have moved to stain his nightstand and the very edge of his chest of drawers. They line his coffee table and his granite counter top.  
  
“Sure,” he says. “Why not?”  
  
—  
  
He dreams of a stretch of beach on the coast, where black rocks are built like religious monuments along the sand and the water hides a riptide under the mirror surface of the cape. Mike always told him never to stray too far, never to get close to the water because the ocean isn’t nearly as calm as it looks. It’s an illusion, and if he’s not careful it will pull him under.  
  
But now Anders stands on the very edge of the waterline while waves crash against the rocks, screaming like brass instruments in his ears. He is alone except for the voice that sings its encouragement, telling him to wade into the ocean, to keep walking until he cannot turn back. So Anders walks despite the pull of the current and the panicked flicker of his pulse, until the water begins to drag him under. The sound is a deafening white static and he wants to fight it, to swim, to kick his legs and scream and shout but all he can do is close his eyes and let the sea take over. His last breath bubbles up through black water and Anders wakes with a gasp, sitting up in bed as thunder crashes outside.  
  
“Hey,” Mitchell says, his hand on his shoulder, rubbing gently. “It’s just a storm.”  
  
Anders struggles to even his breathing and turns to look at the flicker of lightning outside the window. Storms are rare in London, but sometimes, in the humid July sky, the city gets a glimpse of electricity.  
  
“I’m surprised it took you this long to wake,” Mitchell says, pulling him back down to lay against his chest. His collarbone is sharp at Anders’ temple but his skin is cool, and his gentle fingers draw him farther and farther away from the ocean. He’s never been a light sleeper. “Hey, are you okay?”  
  
Anders nods as lightning gives way to orange street lights and a bead of sweat slides down the nape of his neck. Sometimes, on nights like this, he wakes frantic to find himself alone in bed, to not have Ty at his side.

“I’m fine,” he whispers, reaching up to curl a strand of his hair around his fingers. “I was just dreaming.”  
  
—  
  
Sometimes Bragi won’t stop talking. Sometimes he whispers secrets, stories of men who lost their minds to the depths of icy rivers and lovers blind to all but their fingers entwined. He sings symphonies and they dream of tragedies, with every line scripted and riddled with stage directions. Anders thinks he might go insane, that his frayed nerves and his lack of sleep will lead to something irreparable. Generally, he turns to coke, but when Mitchell smiles at him, his hair falling into his eyes, Anders doesn’t waste a second.  
  
He has him back against the wall, sinking to his knees before his jeans are even open, pulling them down far enough to take him all the way into his mouth, breathing heavily through his nose. Mitchell sighs, allows his head to fall back, bares his throat. “You’re in a rush.”  
  
Anders looks up and draws his tongue from root to tip, allowing his cock to fall from his mouth with an obscene sound. “I really need you to fuck me,” he says, his voice raw as he presses a kiss to his hipbone.  
  
“Well then, I don’t know what exactly you’re doing down there.” He pulls him up and shoves him towards the bedroom, stripping off clothing in halftime. Anders reaches for the lube left open on the windowsill and coats his hand as Mitchell tugs at his boots. He already has two fingers inside himself when Mitchell finally crawls along the sheets and Anders begins working on a third.

“Jesus,” he breathes into his neck.  
  
“He won’t shut up,” Anders gasps, avoiding his prostate to the very best of his ability. “You need to make him shut up.” Mitchell pulls off his clunky silver rings with his teeth and tugs at his wrist, replacing Anders’ fingers with his own. They’re dry and it hurts and for a single, beautiful breath, Anders can’t hear a thing.  
  
“Yeah?” He whispers into his throat. He traces his pulse with his tongue and Anders no longer has any control at all over his own voice when he whispers, “Bite me.”  
  
Mitchell pulls away suddenly, pinning him down with his palm flat against his chest, his fingers over his heart. Anders watches his black eyes draw up the length of his body as he whispers, “Never say that again.”  
  
“Why not?” He reaches for his shoulder but Mitchell grabs his wrist hard enough to leave marks.  
  
“Because it’s dangerous, Anders. And you know that.”  
  
“I don’t mind,” he breathes and Mitchell lets him go. Instead, he lays against him with a hand splayed across his windpipe. He doesn’t press down, but Anders wishes he would. He arches his back until Mitchell kisses him again.  
  
“What if it wasn’t you?” Mitchell asks. “What if it were Ty?”  
  
Anders stops moving, his eyes open. “What?”  
  
“Would you take the chance with Ty? Would you risk coming home to find him covered in blood? Seeing his eyes wide open and his throat torn out?”  
  
“Mitchell, what the fuck?” He pushes him off, scrambling backwards until he hits the headboard. Mitchell is sitting back on his heels, watching him.  
  
“That’s how you need to think of this, otherwise it’s never going to work. What would you do if it were your brother? Any of your brothers?”  
  
Anders shakes his head. “I would kill you,” he whispers.  
  
Mitchell eyes are clear when he leans forward and cups Anders’ cheek in his hand. “Good,” he says. “Now you understand how it feels.”  
  
He tries to steady his breathing, but nothing can shake the image painted in red and black across his subconscious. He can’t quite bring himself to speak, so Mitchell pulls him into his arms, tugging the duvet over their shoulders and whispers apologies into his hair. “They’re the only things you’re not willing to lose. And I’m not willing to lose you, Anders, even if it means I don’t get to keep you.”      
  
—  
  
“I’m sorry,” Anders tells him the next morning over lukewarm tea. “I wasn’t thinking.”  
  
“No,” Mitchell agrees. “You weren’t. How is he today?”  
  
Bragi has been calm, on the razor’s edge of collected, and Anders feels like he can breathe again. “Normal,” he says and Mitchell nods.  
  
“I get like that too sometimes, but when I do I won’t come here.” He traces the rim of his mug with his fingertips. Anders nods because he understands, even if it’s just in metaphor. Like everything in life, he’ll adapt to it, he’ll make it his.  
  
“Have you ever killed someone you loved?” Anders has loved very little in his life and he can’t quite imagine the pain that could come from something so savage. He thinks it would be noxious, that it would be fatal.  
  
“No,” Mitchell says. “Never. Because I always know when it’s time to leave.”  
  
“It isn’t though, is it?” He asks, his throat still raw.  
  
“No,” Mitchell says, pressing a kiss to the top of his head as he walks towards the sink. “Not yet.”    
  
—  
  
His flat is bare, nearly empty, but for the piles of laundry left abandoned on the floor and mismatched mugs of half finished coffee left ringing his counter top. Anders runs his finger over the surface of an empty built in shelf, painted white to match the walls. “You don’t have many things, do you?”  
  
“When you move around enough, you realise stuff’s more trouble than it’s worth.”  
  
“No books,” Anders says.  
  
“No,” Mitchell agrees, shoving another handful of clothing into his rucksack. “I’ve never been much of a reader. Television was one of the best things that ever happened to me.”

Anders thinks it’s a horrible shame, but he doesn’t say it. “Maybe you should get a library card,” he suggests, and Mitchell snorts, shaking his head.  
  
“Or you could just read to me. That I could handle.”  
  
Anders raises an eyebrow. “Not a fucking chance.”  
  
Mitchell kisses him as he passes. “Worth a shot. Come on, I’ve got enough. We can leave.”  
  
—  
  
Mitchell is walking out the door, dressed for work, just as Ty comes around the corner. He is staring down at his phone, lost to the world, and Anders watches the inevitable train wreck from his position on the couch.  
  
“Oh,” Ty says, stopping inches away from Mitchell’s outstretched arm. “Sorry, wrong-“ He glances up at the number on the door. “No, definitely the right flat. Sorry, who are you?”  
  
Mitchell sends a rather panicked glance over his shoulder, looking at Anders for a bit of direction. “Hello Ty,” he calls from the living room. “Come on in, he was just leaving.” Mitchell steps aside, letting him past.  
  
“I’ll just-” he begins, stuffing his hands in his pockets. “I’ll see you-”  
  
“Tonight,” Anders finishes for him. Mitchell nods, a short, aborted tilt of his head and mouths ‘ _sorry_ ’ before he slips out the door.  
  
“Anders,” Ty says. “What the fuck? Is that your-“  
  
“If you say boyfriend I’m going to actually snap your neck.”  
  
Ty sits down across from him and while Anders expects exasperation or disbelief or even a bit of taunting, he gets something that looks a little like heartbreak. Ty glances around and Anders knows exactly what it is he’s looking for. There are two mugs left empty on the coffee table, and two pairs of muddy boots by the door. Mitchell’s leather jacket is thrown over a chair and his tartan cap is crumpled on the kitchen counter.

“You didn’t tell me. He practically lives here and you didn’t tell me.”  
  
“Ty-” he begins, but his brother cuts him off.  
  
“No, Anders, we- I tell you everything. How could you not mention that you’re- Christ, are you two serious? You’ve never even- I can’t believe you.”  
  
“Seriously Ty, chill out. I didn’t really think you’d care that much.”  
  
“Of course I care.” He sighs, running his hands through his hair. “Of course I’d want to know. How long has it been?”  
  
“It’s not really that simple-“  
  
“How long?”  
  
“Since I’ve been in love with him?” He sinks back against the cushions. “On and off since I was fifteen. More on than off if we’re being perfectly honest.” He smiles at the look of absolute disbelief on Ty’s face. “I told you it was complicated.”  
  
“I want to know everything,” Ty whispers and so Anders tells him. He tells him about the Camden locks, his secret hideaway and its many rough edges and mossy walls. He tells him about the man he met at fifteen, who made him laugh and listened to his stories and smiled like he’d never lost a single thing. He tells him that apart from his long afternoons in Norsewood, it was the happiest he’s ever been.  
  
Ty moves to sit next to him, to rest his head on his shoulder and at one point, when Anders looks down, it’s to tracks of tears against his pale skin. He laughs softly, wiping at his eyes with the pads of his fingers.

“You’re too sensitive for your own good,” he tells him. Ty doesn’t respond, he only swallows heavily and Anders takes it as a sign to continue. He tells him about the day he realised that the man from the lock wasn’t coming back, how he returned home and made pasta sauce from bruised tomatoes while Ty chopped onions into meticulous cubes and Axl ran through the hallways, chasing his invisible foe.

“This part you know,” he says, as he describes five years of drug induced escapes and sugary lip gloss and a single night of doubt followed by another decade of acceptance.  
  
“The night before Axl’s birthday, I saw him waltzing into a fucking pub in King’s Cross. That should’ve been warning enough, honestly.”  
  
“What is he?” Ty asks, his voice soft.  
  
“I am one hundred percent not fucking with you when I say he’s a vampire.”  
  
Ty groans, sinking farther into the couch. “Please, no.”  
  
“Definitely, undeniably a vampire. I’ve checked.”  
  
“You’ve checked?” He echoes, his voice verging on slightly hysterical. “This is so fucked up. He knew you when you were fifteen.”  
  
“Yeah, oddly that’s not the part that got to him. The possibility of accidentally killing me during sex is his main hangup.”  
  
Ty covers his face with his hands and groans. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”  
  
“You saw him, Ty. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t take those odds for a chance to fuck him.”  
  
“I’m so not into guys, you know that,” he says, his voice muffled.  
  
“That doesn’t make you blind.”  
  
His sounds of distress have slowly escalated into a high pitched keening that makes Anders snort with laughter. “I’ll get us something to drink,” he says. “You sit tight.”  
  
They spend the rest of the evening drinking too much on equally empty stomachs, their legs entwined as they lounge against opposite ends of the couch. They talk about the girl in the cafe, about Axl’s stalled quest, about their unreliable family oracle, their even less reliable grandfather. But in the end Ty always comes back to Mitchell.  
  
“What’s he like?”  
  
Anders isn’t sure how to answer that. He and Bragi have compiled Mitchell’s many adjectives into a lexicon between them, but not a single word comes to mind. He wants to say that he’s beautiful, that he is quick to anger and even quicker to burn out, that he wakes most mornings with a smile.  
  
“He’s alright.” Anders says. “We get on.”  
  
“You love him.”  
  
“Yeah,” he agrees. “Like I said, we get on.”  
  
They drink until neither of them can keep their eyes open and Ty begins to nod off as he speaks. “Budge up,” he murmurs, lying down beside him and watching the headlines move across the television screen like digital ticker tape. He thinks he ought to stay awake, to tidy up the bottles left littered across the floor. Instead his eyes flutter closed to the rhythm of Ty’s breathing and he dreams of nothing at all.  
  
When he wakes it’s to Mitchell opening the front door and locking it behind him. Ty is still asleep, his feet hanging off the edge of the couch as he snores quietly into a throw pillow. He detaches himself from Ty’s heavily limbs and stands, stumbling slightly and steadying himself with a hand to Mitchell’s shoulder.  
  
“Everything alright?” He whispers in his ear.  
  
“Everything’s fine. Let’s go to bed. I am very drunk.”  
  
Mitchell smiles, kissing him with a long, lingering breath. “I’ll get him a blanket.”  
  
“Don’t bother,” Anders says, tugging him towards the bedroom. “Trust me, he doesn’t need it.”  
  
—  
  
“I’d like to meet him,” Mitchell says softly into his ear. The room is dark save for the moving flare of street lights from between the slits in his blinds. “Properly,” he adds.  
  
“Why?” Some part of Anders still wants to keep them separate, like his refuge in Camden Town, his own little secret that he clings to in the dark and never acknowledges in daylight.     
  
“Because he seems to be the only other person on earth that you actually talk to.” It’s not much of an answer but he doesn’t have the heart to argue.  
  
“I’ll ask him,” he says and Mitchell hums his thanks into the back of his neck.  
  
He regrets it almost immediately when he finds himself walking down from City Hall with Ty at his side, weaving in and out of the tourists that huddle in groups along the Thames, holding tight to the last waning breaths of August. “If I didn’t know any better,” Ty begins with a smile. “I’d say you were nervous.”  
  
“I’m uncomfortable,” he says. “I just don’t get why you two are so keen.”  
  
Ty pauses for a moment, his hand on Anders’ shoulder and says gently, “Sometimes I forget how stupid you are.” Anders shoves him away and Ty laughs, nearly falling into a group of French students.  
  
They walk the rest of the way in silence and when they finally reach the Millennium Bridge, Mitchell is already there, leaning against the railing and staring up at the Shard with a case of beer in his hand. His hair is windswept, falling into his eyes, and his skin in lit by the blue glow of the bridge. He looks beautiful and when Anders stops at his side, he has to resist the urge to kiss him.  
  
“Nice to properly meet you this time,” he says, holding out a hand. Anders watches them, chewing on his lip.  
  
“I thought we’d just hang out along the Thames for a bit. Pretty low pressure,” Ty says.  
  
“Yeah, Anders mentioned. Hence the alcohol.”  
  
Ty leads them across to the shadow of St. Paul’s, where the bridge ends and concrete steps lead down towards the bank. Anders knows that this is where Ty feels at home. He watched this bridge as it was built, came here every afternoon on his way to Anders’ office and sat on these stairs and looked out over Bankside and counted himself lucky.  
  
“It was years ago, the last time you actually sat here with me,” Ty says as Mitchell hands them each a drink.  
  
“That’s because you always want to go in the middle of fucking winter.”  
  
Mitchell snorts and Anders nudges his shoulder. “I’ll bring you back to this fucking wind tunnel in the middle of January and you can tell me how keen you’d be to sit on cold as fuck concrete steps for an hour while Ty swoons over the poor women out for a jog.”  
  
“I do not swoon over joggers.”    
  
“Sorry, ogles the joggers.”  
  
It’s not a surprise that they get along well. Mitchell can win most people over within minutes, and for Ty he pulls out all the stops. He listens to his every word, exchanges stories and occasionally bites back laughter at Anders’ expense. He leaves them to do the talking and instead leans back and sips at his beer and listens to the symphony of their voices combined, the most beautiful sound in the world. The dull cityscape of Bankside has never looked so stunning.  
  
“He makes properly good pasta dishes. Got quite decent at curries too,” Ty says and Mitchell turns to him in disbelief.  
  
“Anders Johnson,” he says. “You’ve been holding out on me. I didn’t know you could cook.”  
  
“Why should I cook?” He asks. “When I can just pay someone better to do it for me?”  
  
Mitchell laughs and laughs and Ty watches them with a slight smile and finally he says, “I really didn’t intend for you to take that to heart.”  
  
“Damage done,” he says and Mitchell kisses him.  
  
—  
  
“You knew it was me, right?” Anders asks, sipping idly at a Guinness. He’d never been a fan of stouts but he’s been willing to try lately. Perhaps all he ever needed was a taste test with Mitchell’s mouth against his, licking at his lips until it dripped down their chins.  
  
Mitchell watches Question Time like it’s a comedy programme and he barely appears to be able to draw his attention away from the television. “Sorry, what?”  
  
“Do you remember when I recognised you in that club, years ago. Did you know it was me?”  
  
Mitchell nods. “Yeah. I don’t often tell people where I’m from. I knew it had to be you.”  
  
Anders takes another drink and looks back towards the television. Mitchell sighs, nudging his thigh with the edge of his foot. “What did you want me to do, Anders? Come over for a drink and then just leave you again? Besides, you were high as a fucking kite, I didn’t think you’d remember in the morning.”  
  
“Well I did,” he says. “Are you going to leave again?”  
  
“Well, yeah eventually I suppose. I mean-” He stops, and Anders thinks he knows what he was going to say. He sets down his drink and climbs over the cushion and into his lap.  
  
“Do you want to bite me?” He asks.  
  
“No,” he answers, the same as every day. “Not yet.”  
  
He dreads the day his answer changes, when he’ll feel his teeth against his neck, when his eyes go black and lose the life that he sees staring up at him from between his sheets. It’ll be the last thing he gives him before he runs, disappearing into the folds of the city where Anders will never find him.  
  
—  
  
As they walk back from Waitrose, Mitchell sighs and reminisces over the old beat up car he left in Bristol. “We wouldn’t have to carry these all the way if you had one.”  
  
“It’s literally three blocks. Besides-“ he begins, but he’s cut off by an elderly woman with thin black gloves who stops and gives them both a paper thin smile before saying, “Hello dear, how are you?”  
  
Mitchell is grinning down at her, shifting the grocery bags so he can clasp her frail hand in his. “I’m doing alright. It’s good to see you out and about,” he says. “Are you still up for tea on Thursday?”  
  
Anders watches them will ill concealed disbelief. “Of course. And hello there,” she says, peaking around Mitchell’s side and smiling kindly at him. “You must be Anders.”  
  
“I- yeah, hello.” Her fingers feel brittle like coral, her hand cool through the silk of her glove. The whole thing makes him distinctly uncomfortable.  
  
“Well I’ll let you boys go, you look like you have an evening planed. I’ll expect you on Thursday.” She waves, setting off in the opposite direction and when they finally start walking again, Mitchell is smiling.  
  
“You going to explain any of that?” He asks.  
  
“Mrs. Hunter,” he says. “She’s your neighbour, lives in flat seven. We have tea on Thursday nights when you go out with Ty. Her husband died a year ago, so she’s all on her own now.” He pauses, glancing back over his shoulder. “He was a pilot in the Battle of Hamburg. He never spoke about the war except to tell her the name of his operation, called Gomorrah because they leveled the city until nothing was left. They were married for forty six years and she’s afraid that he died unhappy.”  
  
Anders shuffles his feet against the damp sidewalk as he listens. “Does anyone die happy?” He asks.  
  
“Yeah, yeah some people do. I told her I was a solider too once and that I don’t talk about it either, but it doesn’t mean I’m not happy.”  
  
“Did she believe you?”  
  
“I hope so,” he says. “She’s a lovely person. I think you’d like her. Maybe I’ll introduce you properly, one day.”  
  
The very last thing Anders wants to do is to sit and listen to a half senile old woman tell stories about the war and make vaguely offensive comments about the moral integrity of Polish immigrants. But Mitchell looked at her like he saw something perfectly human in the creases of her eyes, something he values more than time.  
  
“We can do breakfast one day,” he says and Mitchell squeezes his hand.  
  
—  
  
September has always reminded him of Camden Town, even when the smell of autumn damp still sets him on edge. Layers of yellow leaves line the sidewalks and condensation collects along his window panes and for a single, glorious week in October, the skies are clear.  
  
“So you’ve killed people,” Anders says, balancing on a bar stool while Mitchell blows smoke into the stovetop fan.  
  
“Is that a question?”  
  
“Not really,” he says, watching him. “I’m ready to hear about it, though.”  
  
Mitchell taps ash into the sink. “You sure about that?”  
  
“No,” he admits. “But I’ve always appreciated a good story.”  
  
Mitchell tells him about opening his eyes to a grave site of boys, not men, with pale, bruised skin, frostbitten and left to the forests of France. Surviving was the greatest high he’d ever experienced, knowing that he alone would walk away. It was two weeks before he discovered blood, another two years before he began to see killing for what it really was. Listening to a man’s heart stop was like being born again and for three decades he was immortal.  
  
But then like a virus his memory was reset, and he thought of his mother for the first time since he was turned. He tried to picture her face, but all he could hear was the whisper of an old Irish song, _the minstrel boy to war is gone_ , and for the first time in a long time, he remembered what it was like to be human. He tried and failed and tried again to stop. Crucifixes burned his eyes like smoke and he thought that maybe there was a God after all, so he sat outside a parish in the north and he prayed and prayed until morning came and Mitchell found himself right back where he'd started, a Catholic boy with barely any faith.  
  
So now he works in a hospital, steals blood from frozen stores and when days grow particularly long and his heart turns rancid he visits the coma ward and he takes what he needs.  
  
“What’s in Bristol?” He asks. It’s his only question, his only reaction, and Mitchell sighs like he’d been expecting it.  
  
“The man who made me.”  
  
“Is he like you?” Anders plays with one of Mitchell’s cheap plastic lighters, fluorescent green, a shade he’s always been partial to.  
  
“I hope I’m not like him.”  
  
“Well,” Anders says. “That has to count for something.”    
  
—  
  
He opens up in pieces, tells him about the friends he made in Bristol, about the stony architecture, the city he leaves when the going gets rough but somehow, inevitably, he always returns to. Anders thinks it might be Mitchell’s London. It’s not home, not by a mile long stretch, but it’s his.  
  
“Maybe we should visit,” Anders says. The closest he ever came was a weekend in Bath with a group of friends when he turned nineteen. They spent two days getting high and sleeping around, and Anders hardly remembers a thing. “You can show me the sights. Don’t they have like, a bridge or something?”  
  
Mitchell doesn’t smile, he doesn’t kiss him or sigh his name. Instead he shakes his head, looks away and says, “You can’t go there, Anders, not ever.”  
  
“Do they want you dead?” He asks, curious.  
  
“No,” he says, fiddling with the handle of his empty coffee mug, tracing the stripes down the sides. “They want me cruel. And it’s a much easier feat to manage.” Anders cannot picture him as a monster, not with those beautiful black eyes and his gentle fingertips. But he imagines he must have been, once upon a time, a beast from his old storybooks.  
  
“Is that why you go by Mitchell?” He asks. “Is it because they called you John?”  
  
“Yeah,” he whispers, breathing deep. “And I was the worst of them.”  
  
—  
  
Mrs. Hunter introduces herself as Violette, though Mitchell seems incapable of calling her by anything but her married name. Anders has always appreciated a certain level of informality in his life and quickly works up to saying, “Vi, darling, these scones are to die for,” as Mitchell kicks his feet under the table. Anders glances around at her patterned teacups and knitted cosies and her frail, shaking hands and asks, “Do you happen to read the Daily Mail?”  
  
Violette looks over at Mitchell with a frown marring her thin lips. “I thought you said he was clever.”  
  
Anders laughs with delight as Mitchell sighs into his tea. “Oh we’ll get along,” he tells her.  
  
“Of course we will,” she says, setting a plate of chocolate biscuits in front of them. “I have manners.”  
  
They talk about the Tories and Cadbury’s new chocolate recipe and the man who lives above them that paces his floors at night. “It drives me crazy,” Anders says.  
  
“Poor man probably has insomnia,” she tells him, resting her hand on his forearm. “You shouldn’t be so quick to blame him.”  
  
Mitchell never fails to steer the conversation towards the sixties and Violette has her fair share of stories which she tends to leave unfinished. “Well I’ll have to save something for next Thursday, otherwise you’ll grow bored of me. Oh-” she begins, smoothing out the table cloth with idle hands. “That reminds me. Mitchell tells me his lease is up in November. Can I expect a new neighbour soon?”  
  
Anders turns slowly to look at him him, his cheek resting on his palm. “Oh, really?” He asks. “That’s so odd, because this is the first I’m hearing of this.”  
  
Mitchell sips at his tea as Violette apologises with a soft, “Oh I didn’t mean to start anything, dear. I just thought you two would’ve discussed it by now.”  
  
When they’ve said their goodbyes and she’s kissed them both to match, Anders turns to Mitchell and asks, “She knew you hadn’t said anything to me, didn’t she?”  
  
“Of course she fucking did.” He brings them both a beer from the fridge to wash down all that tea and he settles in at Anders’ side.  
  
“You don’t like living alone,” Anders says.  
  
“To be honest, I haven’t done it very often. Figured I’d give it a go this time around. It’s pretty much just as I remember it being.”  
  
Anders leans over and kisses him, tasting Guinness and milky tea. “Well it’s a good thing you’re not much of a collector. Otherwise, we’d need to get a bigger flat.”  
  
—  
  
“Flu season,” Mitchell sighs, collapsing back onto a bar stool as Anders stirs idly at the sauce simmering in the pan. “It’s a fucking nightmare.” He wrinkles his nose. “Especially the kids.”  
  
“Can you get sick?” He asks, curious.  
  
“Nope.”  
  
“Right, but can you get me sick?”  
  
Mitchell tilts his head like he’s never quite considered it. “I don’t know,” he says. “Let’s give it a go.”  
  
He stands to kiss him, but Anders jabs a wooden spoon into his chest, pushing him back. “Oh fuck no, Mitchell, I don’t do sick. At all. I used to take care of Axl and Ty with towels tied over my mouth. Don’t you get near me.” Mitchell laughs and takes a threatening step forward, sending Anders scrambling back. “Fuck, at least change into something clean. Or better yet shower and then change into something clean. This is no longer a request,” he says, brandishing his spoon.  
  
Mitchell dodges around him and presses a kiss to his cheek, much to Anders horror, before he heads off towards the bathroom, stripping off clothes as he goes. Anders drags his eyes up the beautiful, flawless curve of his spine and glances back at the sauce.

“Fuck it,” he says, and switches off the burner.  
  
—  
  
Mitchell collapses in the doorway with his hands pressed to his ears. His eyes are solid black and distant as he stares at the floor. Anders slowly kneels down at his side, repeating his name in an attempt to get his attention. Mitchell’s hands shake as he gently pulls them from his ears, rubbing his thumbs into his palms.  
  
“Mitchell,” he says, with Bragi on the tip of his tongue, and finally he looks up.  
  
“I can hear their heartbeats,” he whispers. His eyes are still black, but there's a light to them now as he reaches forward and presses his hands to his cheeks, his fingers splayed across his temples. “But I can’t hear anything now.” The tears that glaze his eyes finally begin to fall. “Thank God. Thank God, I can’t hear yours.”  
  
Anders is out of practice when it comes to mending hearts. He used to know just how to comfort, what to whisper and when to speak. So instead he sits beside him, wraps his arm around his shoulders and allows Mitchell his silence.  
  
“You know,” he says finally, his voice hoarse. “You know how you always say that gods aren’t meant to be happy?” Anders nods. “I don’t think vampires are meant to be in love.”  
  
He looks down at their hands, their lightly touching finger tips, and traces each knuckle in turn. “But you can’t hear my heartbeat,” he says.  
  
“Not yet.”  
  
“Well it’s too late.” Mitchell looks up at him with red rimmed eyes, a mourning curve to his lips. “That bit is over and done with. Feel free to dwell before you follow the next boy home from Camden Town, but the damage is done.”  
  
Mitchell presses his lips to his eyelids and whispers, “I’m so sorry” against his skin.  
  
“I’m not,” he tells him. Mitchell gave him a season, decades ago, and in return Anders will give however many he has left. “I’m really not.”  
  
—  
  
For years Ty has initiated gentle conversation, subtle pleas to apologise or forgive or do whatever is required to repair the frayed edges of his relationship with Mike and every time Anders shakes his head and tells him there’s not a chance in hell, before assuring him that Mike would say the same thing.  
  
It’s Mitchell, in the end, who thaws his tongue as he threads his fingers through his hair. “He was so young, you know.”  
  
Anders swallows and stares resolutely at the opposite wall. He cannot think past the nights he spent praying to a god he never really believed in that he’d hear the front door open before he fell asleep. I would pray that he would wake in the morning knowing they weren’t alone. “I was younger,” he says.  
  
Mitchell kisses his shoulder, tracing the curve to his neck. “You left before you even turned twenty one,” he reminds him.  
  
“He made me leave.” He wants to shout, but he doesn’t have the energy. “Besides, I knew my brothers were fine.”  
  
“Maybe he did too,” Mitchell says. “After all, they had you.”  
  
“It wasn’t fair.” His arms tighten around his shoulders and Mitchell sighs into his hair.  
  
“No,” he agrees. “But then, it wasn’t fair to any of you.”  
  
Part of him hates Mitchell for saying it, because Bragi captures the words between his teeth and reminds him of them at night while he tries to sleep, dregs up memories he has long since buried beneath the locks. It is nagging and fluid and it takes up too much space in his lungs, pushing out oxygen until one afternoon he sits at his desk and feels certain he will drown.  
  
“Fuck,” he snaps, shoving folders to the ground, watching papers fall around him.  
  
“Anders!” His assistant shouts, rounding the corner, clutching at her heart.  
  
He buries his face in his hands. “You don’t have to have to clean it up,” he tells her. “I’ll do it. Just-” He looks up, straightening his shoulders. “Take the day off,” he says, threading a whisper of Bragi’s voice into his own. “I have business outside of the office today.”  
  
They lock up with papers and pens and clear file folders still littering the floor. “Go home. Call your mother, tell her how thankful you are that she raised you to be a good person.” She nods her head and leaves with hazy eyes. As soon as her sunny yellow coat is out of sight, Anders pulls out his phone.  
  
“Anders?” Axl sounds like he’s just woken up, still in bed until well after noon.  
  
“I need a favour.”  
  
“Well that’s a first.”  
  
“Where’s Mike working these days?”  
  
“He’s on a project near Stratford. He gets off at two.”  
  
“So he’ll be at home by now?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
Anders chews on his lip and tries his best to think back to one of Ty’s many family updates. He knows that Mike sold their little hovel in Croyden well before Axl graduated and Anders never mourned its loss. But they’ve moved around enough since then that he’s lost track. Axl seems to know this, because he sighs and says, “Morden, Anders. He lives in Morden.”  
  
“Right.”  
  
“I’ll text you the address.”  
  
“Thanks, kiddo. Good chat.” He hangs up without waiting for a response. He calls a cab and gives them an address three doors down from Mike’s little brick cottage, sickeningly sweet in its matching suburban neighbourhood.

“Just run the meter,” he says, before jogging up to the front gate. He knocks, takes a step back, and waits for Mike to answer, for his jaw to clench and his eyes to narrow.

“Don’t,” Anders begins. “Just don’t say anything. Do you know what the worst part was, about all this? My only good memories, the ones where I remember being really, properly happy, were with you.” He remembers trying to catch frogs in the river bed, how Mike would come to him with cupped hands, teach him how to handle them. He remembers the tacky feel of their skin beneath his fingertips, and Mike’s whispers of “Gentle, you don’t want to hurt it.” He remembers story books and school bus rides and late night reassurances.  
  
“You taught me the constellations,” he says, though he knows it doesn’t mean a single thing to him. “And it all just- it fell apart and I was so, so angry that you let it. I still am. I daydream about strangling you on a near weekly basis and I bet if you were anyone else on earth, the idea would’ve already lost its appeal. And sometimes I wish I didn’t remember all those things, but then again if I didn’t, I wouldn’t know the constellations.” He takes a deep breath, and his lungs feel clear. “So- so that’s it. That’s all I wanted to say.” He nods once, leaves Mike at the door staring after him, and climbs into the back seat of the cab.  
  
“You can go,” he tells the driver. He doesn’t look back.  
  
—  
  
Mitchell finds him in bed with a half empty bottle of vodka and a technicolour sci-fi film from the sixties playing on the screen in the corner. The volume is too low to hear but Anders watches it anyway, curled on his side.  
  
“This is new,” Mitchell says. “Are we going to start having a drunk classics nights? Because I have a pretty good list going.”  
  
“Not a chance,” Anders mumbles into this pillow. “I’ve just lost the remote.”  
  
Mitchell smiles as he tugs off his hoodie and slides into bed behind him, suggestively running his fingers over the ridges of his hips. “I’m absolutely up for sex,” Anders says. “But I’m also not moving. You have to do everything.”  
  
“I always do everything,” he says, and Anders swats his and away.  
  
“You filthy liar.”  
  
He smiles into the back of his neck, kissing the skin just below his hair line, tugging the edge of his t-shirt up as he presses against him. Anders closes his eyes and tries to relax, to respond appropriately and kiss him back with every bit of the lazy enthusiasm that Mitchell breathes into his mouth. But after just a moment he pulls away, running his fingers down Anders’ cheek, and whispers, “What’s wrong?”  
  
“Nothing’s wrong. You still have clothes on.”  
  
“Tell me,” he says. “What happened?”  
  
He turns back to the screen and watches as a man walks slowly down a silver painted hallway, certain that when he rounds the corner it’ll be to an enemy solider in black nylon. “I hate my family,” he says. “I also, devastatingly, don’t quite hate my family.”  
  
Mitchell laughs, rolling onto his back and staring up at the ceiling. “You know, I actually get what you mean.” He turns to look at him,  every detail softened in the blue light of the television screen, like oil paint on dry canvas. He’s beautiful, though Anders has never said it out loud before and likely never will.  
  
He reaches out, catches one of his curls between his fingers and says, “I don’t hate you either.” Mitchell smiles like the sun and Anders tugs at his hair until he is laughing again.  
  
—  
  
“Get the door, Mitchell.”  
  
He groans around the edge of his mug. “Why?”  
  
“Because it’s going to be a fucking Jehovah’s Witness or something and you can just vamp out-“  
  
“You can literally Bragi them away.”  
  
“Are you paying rent?” Anders asks. “No, I don’t think you are. So go pay your dues and answer it.”  
  
Mitchell grudgingly sets his coffee down and heads for the door but not without viciously ruffling his hands through Anders’ hair first. “Dick,” he snaps, twisting around and hanging over the edge of the sofa to watch.  
  
He hears a soft ' _oh_ ' from the hall, followed by, “Well that certainly explains it.” Mike holds out a hand. “You must be the reason my little brother showed up at my house last week.”  
  
“And you must be Mike,” he says. “Come in.” Anders feels vaguely nauseous as he watches him step through the entry way, looking around with apparent interest.  
  
“Anders,” he says. He nods in return.  
  
“Listen we needed some milk anyway,” Mitchell begins, grabbing his wallet off the counter. “So I’ll just pop over to the shops and leave you two to talk. Need anything?” He asks as Anders sends him an incredulous look from over Mike’s shoulder. “I’ll take that as a no. See you in a bit.”  
  
He closes the door to painful, stifling silence. Anders rubs at his eyes until he sees a shimmer of stars and Mike clears his throat. “Look,” he says, softly. His voice has changed over the years, he can hear it sometimes crackling over the phone, but now Bragi can pick apart every coarse word. “I know we’re never going to be close, but I didn't want us to be strangers.”  
  
“Maybe you shouldn’t have kicked me out then.” He sighs the second the words leave his mouth. “Sorry,” he murmurs. “Reflex.”  
  
“Yeah, I get that. Listen, Anders, I know I shouldn’t have let you shoulder so much. But that doesn’t change the fact that you were coming home with pills of all sorts, you were sleeping around without being particularly safe about it. It wasn’t good for them. Besides you had a housing bursary, it’s not like I left you to the streets. I thought it’d be best for all of us, including you, if you had some independence.”  
  
Anders doesn’t know what to say, so he stares at the wall across from him and takes deep, steadying breaths. Mike takes a seat beside him. He rests his elbows on his knees and stares down at his shoes. “What’s his name?”  
  
“Mitchell,” he says.  
  
“Ty’s been very antsy over the phone for the past few months,” he says with a smile. “I figured you might have forced him into keeping a secret for you.”  
  
Anders snorts. “He is still the world’s worst actor.”  
  
“But it was so handy when he was a kid.” They exchange a knowing grin before they fall silent once more. “He seems-” Mike laughs, shaking his head. “You know what, I couldn’t tell a thing about him. I don’t know what he seems like, but he must have the patience of a saint, being with you.”  
  
“Where he doesn’t have patience he at least has a sense of humour,” he says.  
  
“Does he live here?”  
  
“Yeah. His lease was up last month.”  
  
He nods, drumming his fingers against his jeans. “Is he- is this your first real relationship?”  
  
“Yeah, yeah it is. If you tell him I’ll actually bludgeon you to death.”  
  
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” He stands, rubbing his palms together. “I’m going to head out.” Anders stands with him, suddenly unsure of what to do and how to act and for an irrational second he hates Mitchell for even letting him through the door. Mike lingers in the entry way, his hand on the doorknob. “Things won’t be quick to mend, I get that. But maybe every other Thursday or so, you’ll allow me to intrude on your dinners with Ty?”  
  
“Yeah,” he says softly. “Yeah, why not? Dim T, near City Hall.”  
  
Mike groans. “Really?”  
  
“Ty likes it,” he says by way of explanation. “Don’t be late.”  
  
—  
  
Violette Hunter dies at eighty-two and Mitchell cries at her funeral. They buy bouquets of white peonies, the flowers she held as a bride, and lay them onto freshly turned soil, murmuring their condolences to family members and old friends. They are invited back to the reception, a small affair in Wimbledon at her niece’s home, but they decline with sad smiles when Mitchell says he’d rather stay.  
  
So Anders stands at his side as he traces the letters on her tombstone and he wonders what it is that makes Mitchell fear death the way he does. He’s considered asking him, he’s thought about it dozens of times, but he never does. After all, Anders thinks he knows what will happen when his heart finally stops.  
  
When he lays in bed that night with his ear to Mitchell’s chest and listens for a heartbeat that isn’t there, he stops being so sure. “Do you remember dying?” He asks. Mitchell nods slowly, warily, like he knows what’s coming. “Well?”  
  
“I don’t talk about death with humans.”  
  
Anders looks up at him, his head tilted to the side. He thinks, perhaps, that’s answer enough. If he simply fell asleep, unconscious like failed anaesthetic, if he ceased to exit, Mitchell might not look so terrified. Bragi hums at a soothing pitch, like rain against his windows. The distant quality of Mitchell’s voice keeps him from arguing, from asking anything other than, “Was it quick?”  
  
Mitchell shakes his head and tells him that it was infinite. “But I don’t know what you’ll see,” he whispers. “I truly don’t. You’re an anomaly. But I pray to your god every night to keep you under his jurisdiction.”  
  
He can still hear Bragi’s soothing voice, a murmur on an infinite loop, so Anders closes his eyes and says, “Yeah, he seems to think he’s got that covered.”      
  
—  
  
The mirror is fogged and despite Anders’ many attempts to wipe it down, it continues to glaze back over again, a haze of condensation and water drops. He gives up and shaves using a combination of muscle memory and the silhouette of his reflection. He can’t say he’s really surprised when he runs the razor along his jawline and it catches on his skin, tearing a gasp from his throat.  
  
“Motherfucker,” he snaps, dropping it into the sink with a clatter and pressing a hand to the cut, watching as blood wells in the gaps between his fingers. The hand towel hanging on the wall is a perfect, spotless white and Anders groans, looking around for something to stem the bleeding. He decides to reach for the toilet roll, trying to ignore the way it sticks to the blood on his fingertips just as he hears Mitchell shout, “You alright in there?”  
  
“Yeah, I’m fine, you really don’t-“ but he’s already opening the door, letting in a gust of cool air as the steam stirs and settles and Mitchell watches him with wide eyes. “Like I was saying, you might want to wait in the living room.” He doesn’t. Instead he comes closer, reaches out for his wrist, his fingers tight as he pulls his hand away from his neck.  
  
“Mitchell,” he says. “Hey, Mitchell. Look at me.” He glances up, his eyes a perfect, clear hazel. Without another word he runs his tongue along Anders’ jaw line, pulling away seconds later.  
  
“It tastes like metal,” he tells him, looking slightly dazed.  
  
“Yeah, it generally does.”  
  
Mitchell traces his fingers through the blood on his palms. “Not to me,” he says.

He ducks below the sink, rummaging around through the cabinet until he finds a plaster and a half empty bottle of antiseptic. He dabs at Anders skin, watching the sluggish spread of blood without a hint of hunger. The burn of alcohol feels oddly familiar and he thinks back to Axl’s scraped knees, to how he would blow on his skin to offset the sting. They wash their hands, scrubbing dried blood from between their fingers and Mitchell presses a kiss to the corner of his mouth.

“You alright?” Anders asks, catching his arm before he reaches the door.  
  
“Yeah,” he says with a smile. “God knows I adore you, Anders, but your blood tastes terrible.”  
  
—  
  
Mitchell kisses like he expects to lose him in the seconds it will take Anders to remove his shirt, to crawl into bed next to him and settle against his side. He breathes heavily into his skin, lapping at the hollow of his throat, tracing the shell of his ear and Anders laughs, pulling him closer.  
  
“You’re like a dog today.”  
  
“I’m being affectionate.”  
  
“You’re always affectionate,” Anders says. He climbs on top of him, walks his fingers down his chest. “It’s almost spring.”  
  
“I’ve never cared much for spring,” Mitchell whispers, his eyes closed as Anders slowly rubs his palm over his cock. He adjusts his hips, sighing against the pillow.  
  
“You left in spring,” Anders says, watching him.  
  
“Yeah, but I also came back.”  
  
Anders leans down to kiss him and whispers, “Do you want to bite me?”  
  
“No,” he says. “And I’m beginning to think I never will.” Mitchell always said he would leave when the time is right, when the thrumming bass of his arteries is all he hears in the morning.  
  
“But that doesn’t mean you’ll stay.”  
  
Mitchell shakes his head, smiling sadly. “I know by now that staying isn’t an option. I do love you though,” he adds, wiping his tears away with the edge of his thumb. “I’ve loved you since I saw you kicking your feet over the lock, since I watched you walk in the snow and dance in your shitty night club and don’t think for a second that it will ever be my choice to leave.”  
  
“I’ll try not to hate you,” Anders offers him and Mitchell laughs, pressing their foreheads together and whispers his thanks against his lips.  
  
—  
  
It has always been too late for Anders to reconcile with the sun. All that he’s lost sits catalogued in his head, memories that would take lifetimes to replace. But if Mitchell has anything at all, it’s time. So when they stand at the slopes of the Tullamore River, and Mitchell sinks to his knees to cup the water in his hands, Anders believes for just a moment that nothing is inevitable.  
  
They stay there until their coats are damp and mosquitoes sing in their ears and when the sun finally sets they watch it go down across the perfect, flat expanse of fields. Mitchell squeezes his hand and whispers, “I always wished I’d taken the time to watch the sunset before I left.”  
  
“What did you do instead?” Crickets hop along the reeds and the river sighs and whispers across the rocks and when Anders closes his eyes he can picture Mitchell, a hundred years younger but just the same, falling asleep to the symphony of Gaeshill.  
  
“I got wasted,” he admits. “I don’t remember a single thing.” He presses the heels of his palms to his eyes and takes a deep, shuttering breath. “Thank you,” he whispers.  
  
Anders falls back into the grass and pulls Mitchell down with him. “Look up,” he says. There isn’t a street light for miles, the air is as black as the water in the locks and when they lay back they can see the sky in its entirety. Mitchell’s red rimmed eyes scan every star, every constellation and Anders wishes he could see more than his silhouette against the grass.    
  
Mitchell rolls over until he is leaning over him, hesitating, his breath against his lips. He kisses him then, saying his name like he actually means salvation. “I’ve one more thing to show you,” Anders says, resting their foreheads together, brushing his fingers over tear tracked skin.  
  
He points to the first set of stars above their heads, drawing lines between them, slow enough for Mitchell to follow. “The Crow,” he says. “Bran’s soul set free.”  
  
“His raven heart,” Mitchell whispers, tracing the outline himself. “I remember that story.”  
  
“Mabon,” he continues, moving to the right. “The winter sun.” They trace the patterns of old Irish tales and they exchange their stories, half finished in Mitchell’s memory. He tries to memorise every detail of his hand against the night sky, the slim curve of his wrist and the movement of his fingers.  
  
One day, Mitchell will leave. It’s as constant and inevitable as their shared constellations but now, at least, Anders’ light will outlive his dying star and every time he catches a glimpse of the night sky, Mitchell will remember him.

**Author's Note:**

> I've had a terrible week so I skived off class today and wrote some out of character Britchell instead, in which I moved everyone to London for literally no other reason than I'm helplessly lazy.


End file.
